The documentary features interviews with specialists who talk about the culture and resilience of the people.
Among a dozen feature films from countries on four continents, the Mexican documentary “Tenochtitlan: Ciudad Viva” won the Audience Award at the Madrid Audiovisual Anthropology Exhibition (MAAM).
The event was organized by the Spanish Ministry of Culture to promote discussion and reflection on the use of audiovisual language in the production of anthropological works.
The Mexican documentary was created through the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics (SMGE), supported by the National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies, and portrays a journey of more than 500 years into the past, to review the birth and rise of a city founded in the heart of Lake Texcoco.
The material intertwines the daily life and imperial history of the Mexica people, the last to appear in the Basin of Mexico, around 1300 AD, finding that the best lands in the region had been occupied by the Chichimeca people, followers of Xólotl.
To make the documentary, directed by Luis Fernando Gallardo León, who two years earlier produced “The Conquest of Tenochtitlan: A New Story,” the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico obtained testimonies from specialists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), which demonstrated the resilience of the Teotihuacan culture.
The supervision of the material was in charge of the partner of the SMGE, Ismael Arturo Montero García, and it is nourished by interviews with archaeologists Bertina Olmedo Vera, María de Lourdes López Camacho, Beatriz Zúñiga Bárcenas and Emiliano Melgar Tísoc, and the ethnohistorian Eduardo Corona Sánchez, attached to the INAH.
Also participating are the president of the SMGE, Hugo Castro Aranda; the national researcher emeritus and professor of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, María Teresa Rojas Rabiela; the director of the Museo del Fuego Nuevo, Uriel González Benítez; the professor of the Faculty of Medicine of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Andrés Aranda Cruzalta, and activists in the defense of the biocultural heritage of Xochimilco, such as Félix Venancio González.
What was a typical day like in Tenochtitlan?
“All of them answer questions that help us understand what a day in the life of Tenochtitlan was like, what its citizens wore and ate, how they carried out their public services, what kind of education was given in the Calmécac and the Tepochcalli, what products were sold in the Tlatelolco market, what the peoples subjected to the Triple Alliance (made up of Tenochtitlan, Tacuba and Texcoco) paid in tribute and what buildings were part of their sacred precinct, to mention a few aspects,” reported the National Institute of Anthropology and History.
The documentary also helps us look with new eyes at the archaeological collections of the Mexica Room of the National Museum of Anthropology, and of the museums of the Templo Mayor and Tenayuca, by not only deciphering the knowledge contained in the stones of the Sun and Tízoc, but also admiring the delicate techniques of domestic ceramics.
“Tenochtitlan: Living City” ends in 1519, during the reign of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, when its inhabitants could not even imagine the arrival of the hosts of Hernán Cortés, much less the destruction of their city, whose fame and glory, as mentioned in Brief Memorial about the Founding of the City of Culhuacan, will not end as long as the world remains,” he concluded.
Source: Milenio
