Nebenflüsse

In the summer of 2026, Beto Domínguez Ramos was invited by the Zapatistas to speak, at the gathering of the »arts under pressure« in Mexico, about the experience that begins with the screening of a film.

On 1 January 1994 an armed army of people without names and without faces rose up; the uprising broke open mountains and forests and set new springs flowing. Many took up the camera, not out of vocation but because it was necessary to denounce abuses, to document them and to break through what we called the information blockade.

Over the years these springs became streams and the streams rivers, each carving its own bed. Video activists became filmmakers, urgent documentation turned into the patient craft of storytelling. While some made films and taught film, the rest of us screened them and took them to villages and towns all over the country.

We had to learn that it is about listening and letting stories meet. Cinema consists not only of the stories told in films, but also of those that are told only once the projector is switched off. The films matter to us – but what matters most is the dialogue after the cinema.

With an interview with Beto Domínguez Ramos, translated and with an afterword by Tom Waibel.

*Tom Waibel* works as an author and translator at the intersection of political theory and artistic practice. For several years he travelled with Kinoki's mobile cinema through the mountains and rainforests of Central America.