Introduction by Mara Polgovsky

Tropic of Cancer (Mexico, 2004, 52m)
Mitote (Mexico, 2012, 53m)

One of the best documentary filmmakers of his generation, Eugenio Polgovsky died suddenly last year. Art of the Real pays tribute to him with this double bill of medium-length works: Tropic of Cancer, a pointed dispatch from the deserts of inland Mexico, where impoverished families use homemade traps and weapons to hunt snakes and birds amid arid brushland, a state of existence that might as well be prehistoric; and Mitote, which weaves through the hunger strikers, wrestlers, soccer fans, and shamans at El Zocalo, Mexico City’s vast main plaza, evoking a hallucinatory, vérité snapshot of the nation.