The film focuses on a dairy farm family in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Naomi Uman lived with them for a year, shooting and hand-processing the black and white 16mm film in buckets to dry on the clothesline on-site. A documentary portrait of the daily life of this family, filmed at close range with care and fascination. It is also a portrait of the filmmaker’s learning relationship with the people and space she films in an attentive exercise of listening and looking.

After earlier films by Chick Strand about Anselmo, we continue to follow the Mexican street musician and his lifelong struggle to provide a good life for his children. This film focuses on his relationship with his wife Adela and his mistress Cruz, and theirs with him. In a society where traditional gender roles are separated and sharply defined, the number of children defines male identity and keeps women dependent and homebound. Poverty makes daily survival a desperate struggle. Both men and women must cooperate: men provide food and shelter, and women caringly raise a large family. However, cooperation is often superficial, with very little communication in terms of inner emotional needs. Relationships become economic in essence, thus perceiving both men and women as living in an emotional desert. The film is about lives in conflict from three points of view, as told by the people involved. It explores the division between the real and the ideal. (Chick Strand)

Matriarchs have assembled around a backstrap loom, a pre-Hispanic technique preserved by indigenous women of Mesoamerica. Unfolding like a weaving of figures and the gestures making up this labor, the film circulates between domestic space, an archaeological museum, and weavers’ cooperative. Several ecosystems are built around the craft — tracing its contours and expanding the word ‘freedom.’