Sergei Eisenstein directs Sergei Bondarchuk, Sara García and Isabel Villaseñor in an arthouse travelogue and historical portrait of Mexico assembled posthumously from an abandoned episodic project filmed by Eisenstein until funding was withdrawn. 

Strange how similar the salvaged remenants of this are to Disney’s own later travel anthology Saludos Amigos. The chunks that remain are often beautiful recreations, sensitively featuring the hopes and struggles of poor Mexicans. Their lives are soaked with a telling visual poetry. My favourite moment is when the dowry necklace a women strives to buy dissolves into a matching shot of the lazy groom-to-be in a hammock. You get some wonderful imagery of Mexican culture and landscape. But by its unavoidable fragmented nature, it is also bitty and frustratingly incomplete.

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