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Mexico City Punk

Mexico City Punk

4 Episodes

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.

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Mexico City Punk

4 Episodes

  • Shit Saturday
    24:07
    Shit Saturday
    Episode 1

    Shit Saturday

    Episode 1

    Directed by Gregorio Rocha • 1988 • Mexico

    Brawls with rockers, hair-spiking sessions, scavenging denim at the junkyard, joyrides, and mosh pits—it’s all in a day for the Mierdas Punk (Punk Shits), a youth gang in Ciudad Neza, Mexico City’s outer slum. Shot on gauzily grimy 16 mm, this short fi...

  • Nobody Is Innocent
    58:00
    Nobody Is Innocent
    Episode 2

    Nobody Is Innocent

    Episode 2

    Directed by Sarah Minter • 1986 • Mexico

    Sarah Minter’s howl of punk angst follows teenage Kara as he boards a train without a ticket or destination, leaving behind the slums of Ciudad Neza where he once raised hell with his friends. Cutting back and forth between Kara’s anarchic escapades as a ...

  • Alma Punk
    56:02
    Alma Punk
    Episode 3

    Alma Punk

    Episode 3

    Directed by Sarah Minter • 1991 • Mexico
    Starring Ciro Basilio, Ana Hernandez, Marco Pavon

    Alma (Ana Hernández) spends her days in screen printing, selling records at swap meets, and rehearsing plays and making fanzines with her friends. But Mexico City’s vibrant counterculture scene won’t keep...

  • Nobody Is Innocent: Twenty Years Later
    1:15:35
    Nobody Is Innocent: Twenty Years Later
    Episode 4

    Nobody Is Innocent: Twenty Years Later

    Episode 4

    Directed by Sarah Minter • 2010 • Mexico

    Twenty years after filming NOBODY IS INNOCENT, her indelible portrait of the Mierdas Punk youth gang, Sarah Minter returned to Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl to make this documentary profiling the surviving actors from that film. Each of the Mierdas has taken his ...

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