Collections/July 2024

Mexico City Punk

In the late 1980s, the spirit of punk was alive and well in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza for short), the sprawling, slum-choked municipality on the edge of Mexico City where a fiercely nihilistic youth culture sprang up in response to economic stagnation and urban neglect. Beginning in the 1980s, video artist Sarah Minter and her partner, filmmaker Gregorio Rocha, turned their cameras on Neza, cultivating a special relationship with the Mierdas Punk (Punk Shits), a group of teenagers that exemplified the city’s vibrantly oppositional punk ethos. Blending fiction and documentary, these dispatches from the ragged edge of the global punk scene capture the undefeatable exuberance of resistance in abrasively raw 16 mm and video textures.

4 films — 1 on the Channel, 3 unavailable