The experimental filmmakers known as Colectivo los ingrávidos came together in Tehuacán, Mexico in 2012, adopting their name—which translates into English as “the weightless”—from the title of the first novel of Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, a work that examines acts of translation playing out in three parallel lives against a backdrop of Spanish-language literary culture in North America. Inspired by Luiselli’s themes of translation, displacement, and the imaginative reconstruction of identity, los ingrávidos posed a challenge to the repressive ideology so often articulated in mainstream cinema through the pursuit of an alternative, radical grammar of poetic filmmaking. Their approach is one that contests cultural officialdom, cherishes ecstatic communions with the natural world, and tethers aesthetic experience to social support and free will, utilizing a diversity of forms and processes—from diaristic visions of life in contemporary Mexico to found footage and digital abstraction.
Though the filmmakers themselves are signed in solidarity under a collective banner, the films and videos of los ingrávidos are a med- charset="article23" rel="page_23" rev="replica-location" type="0.515151515151515,0.667635658914729,0.916700336700337,0.839780361757106"/>ley of a restless collision of forms, fashioned together in love and outrage. All experience recedes. Memory fails. Some experiences recede faster than others. In times of disposable souvenirs, fading elegies and dispersed attention, those in power can make uncomfortable truths—of complicity, incompetence, and corruption—vanish under cover of night. Responsibility, blame, and, with them, the possibility for reconciliation
