The notion that Mexico is an incomprehensible country is widely accepted. However, what truly defies understanding is the fact that this incomprehensibility extends beyond its geography, climate, and landscapes. Mexico is particularly elusive to anyone trying to tell its story. Like a kaleidoscope in perpetual rotation, its stories, visions and voices constantly change and evolve into infinity. For nearly a century, Mexican documentaries — inaugurated by Sergei Eisenstein’s monumental projects in the country — have relentlessly sought to capture Mexico’s thriving diverseness and multiplicity in cinematic narratives.  

In Gastón Andrade’s The Phantom Liberty (2022), seven women confined to their bedrooms tell the story of the most unthinkable horror: the loss of their daughters to femicide or forced disappearance. From this abyss, this brave group of mothers speak of the unspeakable, describing life after the loss and gradually embracing feminism as a vital space. Beyond bearing witness to patriarchal violence, The Phantom Liberty is an emotionally resonant audiovisual device: through editing, pacing, color and on‑screen text, the film deepens our understanding of contemporary feminisms across Mexico City — its spaces, sounds, silences, architecture and vitality. Its episodic structure recalls both the urban symphonies pioneered by Vertov and Ruttmann and the Mexican avant‑garde.  

Equally choral and female‑centred, Luciana Kaplan’s The Invisible Contract (2023) invites us to explore a trio of intimate, hidden stories: Rosalba, Aurora and Claudia, sanitation workers in Mexico City’s transport system and public spaces. Through fragmented experiences that encompass family life, labour hardships and sorority as joy and resistance, the director of La Vocera (2020) traverses a Mexico City suffused with a striking black‑and‑white beauty captured by her regular cinematographer, Gabriel Serra. Beneath the surface, The Invisible Contract poses urgent questions about outsourced labour, workplace dignity and, like The Phantom Liberty, the possibility of women weaving networks of resistance against systems that devour them. In a country as vast as Mexico — whose capital is, in itself, a nation apart — these questions remain profoundly relevant.  

This programme is made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Casa de México Foundation in Spain team and Documenta Madrid.