This film is dedicaTed To all members of The gang of The Mierdas Punks

and, To The memory who are gone, especially “kara”

a film by sarah minTer

sarahminter@gmail.com

Nobody is iNNoceNt

20 years Later

Since 1982 makes films in super 8 and 16mm., Video installations and video art among which: Nobody is innocent, Alma Punk, The air of Clara, Intervals, a and recently Talk to me about Love. Her work has been exhib-ited in museums, galler-ies, universities, festivals, etc. mainly in America and Europe, highlighting the MOMA Museum of Modern Art in New York, Bronx Museum, NY. Mu-seum of Contemporary Art in Boston, Haus der

Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Canal Plus in France, Inter-national Festival of Film and Video of Havana, cell etc Contemporary Mexico. S he has won several national and international awards including the Award Coral International Film Festival of Havana, Pitirri Award International Film Festival in San Juan Puerto Rico, Special Prize in the Ethnographic Film Festival in Ber-lin, Germany. Rulfo Prize FilVideoFil Festival in Gua-dalajara, Mexico. She was a founder and currently a professor in the video workshop in the Esmeralda in Cenart.

Contact:Sarah Minter

Quintana Roo 93- 1 Col. Roma Sur 06760 México D.F.Tel. (52 55) 55 74 64 21 Mobil 55 34 79 83 71

sarahminter@gmail.com

Visual Ar tist / FilmmakerSarah Minter

The characters of this film share three things:

They all grow in Neza,

They belonged to the gang Los Mierdas Punks in the 80s and

They participated in the film Nobody is In-nocent, 1986.

20 years later Sarah Minter reconstructs their traces and weaves a new visual map of Neza and other geographies through the ac-tuality of these personages confronting their achievements and frustrations and hopes with their past and their youthful dreams.

Synopsis

TiTle: Nobody is iNNoceNT 20 years laT-er

documeNTary

color FormaT: Hd

duraTioN 75 miN.

couNTry méxico,

year 2010

direcTioN: saraH miNTer

Producers: saraH miNTer

ciNemaTograPHy: emiliaNo rocHa miNTer aNd saraH miNTer

ediTiNg: eleNa Pardo aNd saraH miNTer

souNd: berNaT ForTiaNa

origiNal music: rogelio sosa

aNimaTioN: aisel Wicab

Produced by FoProciNe aNd saraH miNTer

duriNg THe sHooTiNg oF THis Film sarHa miNTer Was suPPorTed For THe sisTema NacioNal de creadores de arTe From FoNca

TesTimoNies: Pablo el Podrido HerNáNdez sáNcHezraFa PuNk rojasjavier camPos cieNFuegos aNTes “boro-las”aNToNio callejas Nolasco “búHo” beNjamiN “elekTroPuNk” aNTes “cosTras”,jaime camacHo “cebollas”HécTor gama “QuerreQue”mario romero “cePi”,arTuro goNzález “moroco”luPiTa rivas

Between 1985 and 1987 I made a documentary/fiction film about a Punk gang called ¨Los Mierdas Punk¨ in Nezahualcoyotl, one of the poorest ar-eas in Mexico city, enti-tled: Nobody is Innocent. More than 40 adoles-cents between 7 and 20

years old participated in the project. This film found a certain success, winning a handful of national and international awards. It was widely screened mainly in the USA, Europe, and Israel, along with Mexico and South America.

For a long time I’ve cherished the idea of portraying the characters of Nobody is innocent in a new depth only possible after the passage of time. I’ve fixed upon making an addendum to the film, updating it as

Project Presentationand Motivation

to where and how they now, how they have grown up in these 20 years. How have they changed? How have the city and Neza changed? How has my vision of myself changed? I feel sure that such a representation of passing time can add a depth, a vol-ume, new perspectives and readings, to character por-trayals -- especially notable in moving images. Scarce are our opportunities to track film characters over years. In a documentary, normally, we can only shoot our char-acters in the present, or in certain contained amounts of time. It is possible to produce knowledge of their pasts only through their testimonies and photographs. It is extreme-ly rare that we can shoot a documentary in temporally distant moments of our sub-jects. In this case, however, we made the research with the inestimable help of Pab-lo “el Podrido” (“the Rotten”) Hernández. I

was finally able to locate almost all the youths who participated in the film, except the main charac-ter ´́ KARA who infortu-nately died one year be-fore the shooting.

Now, I had a unique op-portunity to film. We learned that some are dead, some are in Jail, some crossed the USA border, some are working and having children, etc. My plan was to film about their contemporary situ-ations and to reconstruct their stories in these last two decades.

The forking paths these individual former punks

have walked in a sense form a map of the patterns of their social class more broadly (occasionally limited ascent, but more often imprisonment, illegal immi-gration, young death). What difference did the punks ever have from their peers but a bit more visibility, a bolder – or more cynical – appropriation of their marginalization?

The varied paths of these figures matter, in that any moment’s “outsiders” are in a sense the visionaries, the most outspoken representatives of the dispos-sessed masses – which in Mexico amount to roughly half of the population, today living in a poverty no less oppressive than then.

Contact:Sarah Minter

Quintana Roo 93- 1 Col. Roma Sur 06760 México D.F.Tel. (52 55) 55 74 64 21 Mobil 55 34 79 83 71

sarahminter@gmail.com