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Act One is an ethnography of violence reflecting on a history of conflict in Central Mexico. The film appropriates visual motifs from 18th century European Romantic landscape tradition with its depiction of the uncontrollable power of nature and cataclysmic extremes, echoing violent occupation of land in rural Mexico. The film posits a decolonial approach to the visual representation of violence in Mexico, transporting us beyond the realm of suffering into a space for quiet contemplation as the violent terrain of occupation enters the frame. Through a poignant testimony of a kidnapping survivor, intertwined with the pastoral rural landscapes of her captivity, the film documents geographies of disappearance at the threshold of detectability.

This film follows various activists and community members involved in the 2011 Purhépecha uprising in Cherán.

Parc Mont-Royal attempts to show how cinema evidentiates the relationship between the observer, the observed and the gaze. Such notions as scopophilia, gaze, visual pleasure and voyeurism remained as critical issues on film scolarship. My video piece comments on how the technology of cinema has modified not only our notions about the gaze, but also the gaze in itself. As the experience of cinema is mainly constructed around framing and frame speed, our expectations revolve mainly around these two formal devices. What happen when we receive visual information through different uses of these two formal devices?.

For over 400 years, the tortuous Indigenous land conflict in the state of Michoacan in Mexico, remained largely ignored until this conflict intersected with cartel lords and illegal drug trade. The state of Michoacan is the birthplace of the drug war in Mexico, initiating an unprecedented regime of violence meanwhile affecting the Indigenous landscapes of the region.

Marie-Josèphe Angélique was a black slave in New France (Montreal, Canada, 1734), who was tortured, hanged and burned down to ashes, guilty of setting a fire, burning down much of what is now known as Old Montreal. This experimental documentary uses the hanging of the Black slave Marie-Angélique, employing found footage as mode of investigation for emergent metaphors of gender and race, examining the dynamics between Blackness and racialized political history.

Landscape painting in Mexico often acted as a mechanism for colonial subjugation, perpetuating Eurocentric artistic and historical values. José María Velasco is considered one of the most influential artists who made Mexican geography a symbol of national identity through his landscape paintings. This video 'portrait of a nation' reexamines José María Velasco's pastoral landscapes, situating them as instruments of surveillance and colonial violence. By rephotographing Velasco's landscape paintings with a surveillance camera and re-staging them with the collaboration of the Indigenous Purhépecha's in Mexico, this video piece addresses the complexities of the political geography of race in Mexico, rendering landscape painting and video technologies as surveillance assemblages.

'Salix Tree' it's the documentation of a displaced domestic space, a self-ethnographic document about my first eight years of displacement as a consequence of leaving Mexico and moving to Montreal. In which language does one self-documents when there is no mother tongue anymore?. As immigrants we are meant to forever wander between the home we just lost and the one we have to construct for ourselves once again. And this is true about language as well. Whatever second language we are communicating with, no matter how much we master it, we never quite own it. Language is a masquerade as much as it is a product of domestication and control. 'Salix Tree' is a self-ethnographic document meant to be experienced as a passage between languages, a concentration of voices whose identity remains opaque. Some of these voices materialize into complete translation, while others provide a departure from national identity and their dominant linguistic form. Is the narrator who is telling the story identical with the narrator about whom the story is being told?. When at exile our personal history somehow transfigures into a systematic articulation of mythologies, evoking the imaginary. I shot the footage over several years, appropriating narrative and stylistic strategies from home movies, such as shaky camera, people acknowledgement of the presence of the camera, and documentation of rites of passage. I consider the home movie to be an important component of popular culture. The home movie is not only a place for the transmission of personal history and documentation of kinship affiliations, but is also a place for self-ethnographic practice, colliding family representation with avant-garde pursuits. The story of the immigrant somehow succeed to be positioned as a survival narrative; a tale of losing and recovering, failure and success, integration and rejection. More than often we found ourselves narrated with the same schemes: forced labour, below average income and poor living conditions. We have been narrated from the perspective of an hegemonic dominant system, a system that is heavily focused on the simplistic operation of narrating the immigrant by highlighting differences on domestic economies and social mobility. We have been representing someone else roles that somebody wrote for us, deciding our careers, our salary, our place in society. However those are not the only elements of the story of the immigrant that matter the most, even further, those are not even the most important. The narrative of the immigrant is losing its great hero and its achievements, its great dangers with great voyages. It is being now dispersed in clouds of more modest and localised narratives.