Totonaco. Muere mi Rostro
2014 · 2m · México
Directed by Gabriela Badillo
Genres: animation, fantasy, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
An indigenous myth based on the poem 'Muere mi Rostro' by Manuel Espinosa Sainos is retold through animation. The story forms part of a project giving voice to Mexico's indigenous languages and stories.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a respectful retelling of indigenous myth through animation—formally competent, culturally purposeful, but a little too reverent to really upend anything. Where's the formal weirdness, the visual risk that would make this *unsettling* rather than just solemn?
Badillo situates this within a lineage of animation reclaiming suppressed narratives and oral traditions, and the restraint in the visual language—the way surrealism serves the mythic rather than dominates it—demonstrates real curatorial awareness of how indigenous voice demands formal respect, not spectacle.
The choice to animate at this particular economy of line and color—sparse enough to keep the viewer's eye searching, dense enough that the surrealism doesn't tip into abstraction—is what lets a 2-minute poem breathe as cinema instead of illustration.