Minotaur + My Skin, Luminous

Two of Nicolás Pereda’s most elusive films move from domestic seclusion to the classrooms and countryside of rural Mexico, finding unexpected paths from the mundane towards the dreamlike.

In Minotaur, three thirty-somethings inhabit a Mexico City apartment filled with books, passing languid afternoons reading, sleeping and receiving occasional visitors. Outside, Mexico is burning; inside, time seems barely to pass. Pereda creates an atmosphere of pleasurable inertia, where literature becomes a means of communication and the apartment appears increasingly sealed off from the world beyond it.

Co-directed with longtime collaborator Gabino Rodríguez, My Skin, Luminous begins with footage ostensibly commissioned to document improvements to Mexico’s public schools. At a primary school in Michoacán, this institutional assignment gives way to the story of Matías, an orphaned boy isolated from his classmates after mysteriously losing the pigment in his skin. Together, the films reveal Pereda’s particular gift for allowing ordinary spaces to quietly harbour other worlds.

Minotaur, dir. Nicolás Pereda, Canada / Mexico 2015, Spanish with English subtitles, 56 min