email print share on Facebook share on Twitter share on LinkedIn share on reddit pin on Pinterest

Adriana Trujillo • Producer

"At the end, documentary is a form of poetry and rhetoric"

by 

- We met up with Adriana Trujillo, Emerging Producer 2017 from guest country Mexico, to discuss her work with the production company Polen

Adriana Trujillo  • Producer

We met up with Adriana Trujillo, Emerging Producer 2017 from guest country Mexico, to discuss her work with the production company Polen.

What qualities should a documentary producer have these days?
The volatile form of “reality” has been transforming genres and narratives. Today, the “real” is a political concept. In our day and age, we continue the urgent discussion to redefine our relationship to the factual. The contemporary moment for a producer, as regards the fact might be described as an existential crisis. Science and art are playing together in the same scenario; images are transforming into data; how do we confront information, digital-images and truth? In that way, our relationship to knowledge is easily blurred into uncertainty. Today, the possible answer to “the real” is to confront our own comfortable ways of perception and to follow the senses and emotions during the development of new projects. New forms of visual thinking, interface knowledge and fragmented realities. At the end, documentary, as a form, is not simply an accretion of facts, but a form of poetry and rhetoric.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

To what extent do you, as a producer, get involved in the creative process?
As a director-producer my connection with the projects is absolute. I work only with projects that require total commitment. Nowadays, the collaborative process is crucial to the development, production and distribution of any new film.

What projects do you have under way? 
We are producing three projects:

1821: The Era of Good Feelings (DOC Station Berlinale Talents Project): Nico embarks on an entangled, tender and cruel adventure to delimit the Mexico-US border territory in 1821. Obsessed with the figure and texts of the explorer Alexander Von Humboldt, Nico sets on the titanic mission to demarcate the border: from the Oregon coast to the Gulf of Mexico. The film is a bridge to contemporary history, bio-power relations, politics and violence between two countries that share one of the longest and asymmetrical borders in the world.

Tongue Nest: Tongue Nest is a requiem of the last Yuman survivors in the northwest of Mexico. Intertwining their latest myths and magic through geo-symbolic elements, the film mixes history, science-fiction and experimental ethnography. It is a futuristic elegy about the imminent death of a nation, associated with post-colonization contradictions, modernity, and a dreamless world. It is a film about a topic that is urgently relevant to our contemporary culture: extinction.

Insurrection: Follows the utopic obsession of a group of anarchists determined to liberate the north of Mexico in 1911. Between hallucinations and mirages, they evoke the spirit of freedom in the continuous human desire for power. Inside a cavernous and abandoned theater representing their territory, inhabitants of Tijuana, in a form of a Greek tragedy, are exploring the limits between the ephemeral and the eternal.

----------

Emerging Producers is a promotional and educational project, which brings together talented European documentary film producers. The programme is organised and curated by the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Deadline for applications to the Emerging Producers 2018 edition is 31 March, 2017. Click here.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

Did you enjoy reading this article? Please subscribe to our newsletter to receive more stories like this directly in your inbox.

Privacy Policy