“Nómadas: A Documentary Portrait of Mexico’s Wildlife and the Urgency of Conservation”

Mexico City.- Settled in the Yucatan Peninsula, a father and a mother who have emigrated from the Caribbean watch over the care and survival of their calf.

In turns, the pair leaves the nest to search for food; he has had to travel 500 kilometers to find it. When she leaves her, nothing guarantees that he will return, and then his partner must take care of that creature with whom they have communicated since its gestation so that it learns to recognize the sound of her.

Although it seems like the story of one of the many families that risk everything by migrating from one nation to another in search of better living conditions, in this case it is about what some of the pink flamingos go through when they fly to Río Lagartos to nest. , as shown by the documentary Nómadas (2019), currently on the billboard at the Cineteca Nacional.

“It is a film that deals with the stories of some of the most charismatic animals that arrive in Mexico every year to complete some point in their life cycle,” says producer Paula Arroio Sandoval in a video interview.

“What’s very important in this film is that we wanted to do a portrait of individuals,” he continues. “We follow some of the histories that each of these species face to somehow, as human beings, think that they are also individuals just like us.”

Naughty and playful characters, like the coatis having fun in the mangrove swamp in Yucatan; titanic elephant seals fighting over being the alpha male of their harem in the San Benito Archipelago, and mothers, whether gray whales in Baja California or spider monkeys in the Calakmul Biosphere, struggling to protect their calves from threats and predators .

All this without forgetting, of course, the largest insect migration on the planet: the amazing exodus of the monarch butterfly from Canada to the coniferous forest in Michoacán. A national favorite of which the tape gives away impressively intimate scenes, revealing in detail their mating and metamorphosis.

“(Nomads) tries very hard to raise awareness of this part of the complex, the great effort that these species have to make to survive, and the wonder that each one of them is,” remarks Arroio Sandoval about the Mexico-United States co-production, written and directed by Emiliano Ruprah.

Thus, although the interactions of all these species go through the human lens to seek to trigger empathy, highlighting how little distant we are, for example, from those pelagic crabs that cling to life in the midst of the hazardous tide or the mobulas striving to impress a potential mate, the ferocity of wildlife ends up overriding anthropocentrism. And a maxim prevails:

“It is not an act of cruelty, but of survival,” Sasha Sökol is heard saying, who narrates a documentary full of moving, anguishing and amazing moments, masterfully captured over a year by sky, sea and land in natural areas. protected in the country.

“I think it is a documentary that defends life and non-humans. In other words, we value that non-humans have the same right to subsist as we do. And also that everything is related; we are related to each other , we are not isolated,” says the producer of this project financed with support from Eficine and FEMSA.

A job, adds Arroio Sandoval, where honor is also paid to the great wealth of national biodiversity, and for which specialists from each species were advised. They, in addition to guiding how close they could get and the best strategy to do it, generously shared everything they knew, in order to decipher what was recorded during hours of recording.

And while the original music by Jacobo Lieberman and Leonardo Heiblum stimulates and immerses the viewer in each projected atmosphere, the shots taken by specialized photographers from tents, with huge lenses and even infrared to peer deep into the caves where they nest the bats, give the material a privileged and unbeatable quality.

“We are very happy that there is a great technical quality. Visually it is a very, very powerful film,” celebrates the producer, sharing that the television version was even nominated for the Emmy Awards. “We’re very happy to be equated with Nat Geo, for example; it means that maybe we already did it.”

In the end, Nómadas, which will continue in theaters and outdoors at the Cineteca until May 11, to then tour schools, rural areas and other venues, is above all a call for conservation. First with subtle sentences throughout the documentary, to then close with the direct warning of the mass extinction that the planet is suffering, mainly due to the responsibility of humans.

“Their protection will define our destiny. If we fail, by the end of the century we could be left extremely alone, having movies like this as our only memory,” the tape concludes.

In honor of environmentalists

Homero Gómez González, defender and promoter of the care of the forests and the habitat of the monarch butterfly in Michoacán murdered in 2020, was part of the experts who helped during the production of Nómadas.

“He was one of the main coordinators (of the sanctuary) at that time, and later it turned out that he disappeared,” recalls the producer Paula Arroio Sandoval, who as a result of making this documentary was able to witness the precarious conditions of the country’s environmentalists, many of them murdered in recent years.

In 2021 alone, 54 people who defended their environment, natural resources, or land were killed in Mexico, according to a report by the international organization Global Witness. This represented a significant uptick compared to the 30 activists killed in the previous year.

“Many of these protected areas, for example, like the one for the monarch butterfly, since it is in a forest, there are many illegal loggers, so that has caused a great confrontation between the cooperative that cares for the monarch sanctuary with all the loggers And now the narco is influencing as well,” says Arroio Sandoval.

The producer highlights that, by identifying the vulnerability of a certain species or habitat and taking actions for its care, community organizations make this their livelihood, they subsist on it; “and it is precisely all these illegal loggers who arrive and break with that community order,” she laments.

“So, for me, my respects, because you really see the love they have for these species and the care. But you see the great risk they run,” he insists, allowing himself to dedicate Nomads to all those defenders.

“It is a documentary that seeks to dignify the great work of all these people.”