In the early thirties, the celebrated Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein planned to go and film in Mexico. With the support of his colleague Robert Flaherty, the painter Diego Rivera and writer Upton Sinclair and his rich wife, he laid the foundation for Que viva México!, a film about the myths, art, religion, death cult, social struggle and history of the people of Mexico. During their stay in Mexico, Eisenstein, Grigori Alexandrov and cameraman Eduard Tissé became increasingly fascinated by the beauty of the landscape and the people. Eisenstein’s ideas about his film travelogue became increasingly megalomaniacal and the patience of his financiers ran out. The project was abandoned and some shots found theirway in a mutilated form into dubious documentaries.Oleg Kovalov, the Russian master of found-footage who was in 1997 a Filmmaker in Focus in Rotterdam: ‘My film is not an attempt to reconstruct a film that was never made – except in the director’s head. The film is an investigation of the nature of unfinished films. It tries to touch the secrets of a lost Atlantis. The key to these secrets is in the contradictions of Mexico, a country where different cultural and social life forms have co-existed for centuries in eternal conflict. With this film we have tried to reveal Eisenstein’s thoughts about life and death, memory and beauty and the divine cosmos in which people live, love and suffer.’
