QUE VIVA MEXICO !

Sergei Eisenstein’s Que Viva Mexico! (Da zdravstvuyet Meksika!, 1979) has been described as his “greatest film plan and his greatest personal tragedy.” Eisenstein’s lesser known film was a passion project which sought to create an expansive cinematic representation of Mexico’s cultural and political history from Mayan civilisation to its revolution from Spanish conquest in the early 1800s. Commissioned by the Mexican Film Trust and financiers Upton and Mary Sinclair in 1930, the film was shot between 1930-1932 and troubled with production issues, primarily a lack of money and time to complete the project, leading to the abandonment of the project. The film has been praised for its exploration of Mexican folklore and mythicism, with Eisenstein’s roots in Soviet avant-garde and unorthodox editing styles reinforcing themselves in this portrayal of Mexico. Although various versions exist of this project, SEAGER will be showing the most well-known and acclaimed; Grigori Alexandrov’s 1979 cut. Playing with editing in true Eisenstein homage, Alexandrov’s edit intersperses ethereal fragmented Mexican stories and histories with his ‘real-time’ narration of the film’s editing process, showing the power of cinema to create new methods of surrealist and provocative storytelling. The film was awarded the Honourable Golden Prize at Moscow’s International Film Festival in 1979.

ARTIST and PRESENTER

Anika Vajagic is an artist experimenting with filmmaking, photography and graphic design. Born in Toronto (CA) and based between London (UK) and Belgrade (SRB), she graduated from King’s College London’s Film Studies BA in 2022. Her work explores the complexity of belonging to various places and communities. Using newer and older camera technologies, she seeks to learn about her relationship to familiar and unknown places and people by observing moments with meaning. Primarily shooting in London and the West Balkans, she strives to document how others coexist with each other within their worlds and the beauty and comforts that come from these shared experiences