Filmed in New York’s Times Square, Success (2014) is a dystopian vision of urban life. In this short film, pedestrians navigate a landscape of digital billboards promoting branded content and news headlines alongside conspicuous advertisements to ‘Save the Forest’, featuring stylised images of indigenous peoples who seem trapped within a hyperbolic visual regime.

Polgovsky’s debut film, Tropic of Cancer (Trópico de Cáncer) (2004), depicts the lives of impoverished families in the arid central Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. Subsisting by selling plants and animals to motorists by the side of a superhighway leading to the United States, the families battle poverty and an unforgiving desert climate. Comprised of handheld images of searing potency, the film is an intimate, near-wordless visual essay on the human capacity to adapt to even the most adverse circumstances.

This screening is introduced by critic and film programmer Olaf Möller (Aalto University, Helsinki) and followed by a panel discussion between Möller, Michel Lipkes (Director of FICUNAM), Mara Polgovsky (Birkbeck, University of London) and Erica Segre (Trinity College, Cambridge).