✸ El Mago: The cinema of Bruno Varela ✸
► In June, Cinédoc Paris Films Coop dedicates a screening to Mexican audiovisual artist Bruno Varela, whose body of film work – still largely unseen in France – combines experimental cinema practices with ethnographic approaches.
By exploring alternative modes of representing communities and collective experiences, Varela’s practice departs from the conventional parameters of documentary filmmaking. At the same time, his use of image fragmentation, frequent recourse to archival materials, and his work with repetition and layered sound place his films firmly within the field of experimental cinema. In addition to his involvement in Indigenous community video projects in Bolivia and in southern Mexico, particularly in Oaxaca and Chiapas, his work is distinguished by its articulation of formal experimentation with political, social, and cultural concerns, giving him a singular position within the landscape of contemporary experimental film.
This three-film programme – comprising two very recent short films and a medium-length work from 2019 – invites viewers into a sensory and associative experience in which memory, fiction, politics, and imagination are continuously interwoven.
Programme introduced by Raquel Schefer (Sorbonne Nouvelle), in collaboration with the Radical Film Network 2026. Screening followed by a discussion.
► Screening :
Juego de artificio
2025, digital, colour, sound, 3’55
“A small struct/rural film lasting 30 meters,
a music-box mechanism with a broken spring.
Allegorical images, returns, escapes.
So that sparks and dancing can make it rain.”
La ranura en el tiempo
2024, digital, colour, sound 13’40
“This is the second part of the diptych Anáhuac against robots, in which an invisible war takes place; it is a confrontation of a magical order, where signs and their repetition produce time and its symptoms. Other maps are needed in order to account for this dislocation: quantum event maps, interior travel maps, sonic maps, common memory maps, milpa maps, maps of connections.”
Monolito
2019, digital, colour, sound, 40’
“The monolith is inhabited by a tiny entity, a conscious universe, a god or one of its forms. In its attempt to resonate with the human, it only manages to intensify the fire. Everything burns to prepare the new sowing. A film in rough draft, low-resolution materials, intensities, flows, affected bodies and bodies affecting other bodies. The revolt is a present tense state, expansive. A feature-length short film, a short film of feature length. Archives from Oaxaca 2006, premonitions, machine-induced dreams, signals emanating from deep space. Fire in the present, as an anticipation of the moment. Free appropriation of a premise by Félix Guattari, an incendiary and extraterrestrial declaration of love. A great poster and very good stills. A film that fails in its temporality, a film still to come.”
Approx TRT: 57 mins
More info about the Radical Film Network Conference 2026: https://www.sorbonne-nouvelle.fr/fronts-en-construction-building-fronts-radical-film-network-conference-2026-928196.kjsp
Thanks to: Bruno Varela, Byron Davies.