Friday 20 November 2026, 6.30pm — at Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa (Grande Auditório)

Mexico Will No Longer Exist!
(¡Aoquic iez in Mexico! ¡Ya México no existirá más!)
Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco
2024 | Mexico | 80′ | Spanish, with English subtitles

Screening followed by a masterclass with the filmmaker, in dialogue with Catarina Alves Costa (CRIA)

As a prolongation of Doc’s Kingdom 2026: Undercurrents, counterspells, where the film has its first Portuguese premiere, Mexico Will No Longer Exist! travels from Odemira to Lisbon for a session at FBAUL, followed by a masterclass with Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco. Distinguished at FICUNAM and FICValdivia, the film had until now remained unseen in Portugal, as has the work of its director, one of the most singular figures in the new generation of experimental cinema.

Seven years in the making, the film treats celluloid as a living and perishable surface, scratched and corroded until the image itself seems to breathe. Mexico City appears as a palimpsest in which the Conquest still resonates in the signs of the metro, and the gods of Tenochtitlan migrate onto the tattooed skin of young bodies. Archive and mise-en-scène, ritual and love song, street protest and telenovela enter into flashing constellations, in the manner of Benjamin’s dialectical images, where past and present briefly recognise each other. The founding myth of mestizaje comes undone in this montage, and from its ruins emerges a time out of joint in which the ancestors keep dancing.

In the masterclass, Quagliata Blanco will reflect on disintegration as an aesthetic and political force in her handmade practice, and on the experimental genealogies her work sets in motion, from Luther Price to Gregorio Rocha, from Rubén Gámez to Maya Deren. The conversation with anthropologist and filmmaker Catarina Alves Costa will open onto the question of how images carry, transform and reinvent ancestral memory.

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Annalisa D. Quagliata Blanco (1990, Veracruz, Mexico) is a visual artist and filmmaker whose films and installations explore the human body and portraiture as mirrors of different states of being, spanning the personal, social, and political. She has a particular interest in analog and handmade film as a medium for capturing the poetics of light, materiality, and the moving image. Her first feature film, “Aoquic iez in Mexico! Mexico will no longer exist!” was released in 2024. Quagliata Blanco grew up in Mexico City and has lived in Taiwan, New York, and Boston, where she was a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Currently lives and works in Mexico City.

Catarina Alves Costa is a Portuguese filmmaker and anthropologist, professor at NOVA FCSH, researcher and director at CRIA (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia).

>> Free admission, no registration required.

Organised with the support of CRIA — Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, in partnership with the Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa.