Experiencing Interruptions?

Frontera

As the waves of the sea caress and systematically pass through the iron pillars that compose the Mexican/US border wall, a woman's body dances, free, a looped choreography, falling and rising, in the name of the women who are missing in Mexico.

  • Laurene Praget
    Director
  • Laurene Praget
    Writer
  • Laurene Praget
    Key Cast
  • Rubén Colin Gama
    Camera Assistant
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Frontera
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    3 minutes 34 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    July 28, 2023
  • Country of Origin:
    France, Mexico
  • Country of Filming:
    Mexico
  • Language:
    Spanish
  • Shooting Format:
    Numérique
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Black & White
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • Divine Feminine Film Festival
    New York
    United States
    October 29, 2023
    World Premiere
    Best Dance Film
  • Nahui Ollin
    Durango
    Mexico
    November 22, 2024
    Official Selection
Director Biography - Laurene Praget

Laurene Praget is a multidisciplinary artist, bilingual French and Spanish, raised in Brittany, France. She's currently living between New York and France, after being based several years in Mexico City.
She conducts an intimate, organic and poetic documentary work that testifies and archives women's lives, telling realities and stories, paying tribute and coming to show with delicacy and care what is hidden or ignored.
She works through painting, focusing this practice since 2017 on painting portraits of missing women in Mexico City from the notices of disappearance that she encountered daily in the street, as a tribute and to resist against their invisibilization.

After several projects and collaborations about violence against women in Mexico, she began to see her artistic concerns extend toward being present in the world as a woman. She developed projects in both analog and digital photography, using the image as an archiving of women's (hi)stories within contemporary concerns and using a poetic and intimate vocabulary. She also began to question her own relationship to this world, she seeking a sensitive form of undamaged femininity requiring a healing process. Within this movement, she began to involve her own body in her projects to observe and try to express her vision of femalehood, connected to the Earth and other women, documenting the strength of vulnerability, through self portrait video and more broadly through experimental video poetry.

As a painter and photographer, her work has been exhibited in Mexico City, Paris and Barcelona, among others. Her short film te miro a los ojos mientras voy sanando lo que me dañaron realized in 2021 has been selected in many international festivals, including in New York City, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile and Tabriz in Iran where it received the prize for Best Experimental Film during the First Women Film Festival in 2022. Her short video poetry Frontera received the Best Dance Film Award during the Divine & Feminine Film Festival in New York in 2023.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

I went to Mexico's northern border with the USA, in Tijuana, after years of painting the faces of missing women in Mexico City from the missing persons notices I saw on the streets every day. They are more than 26.000 disappearing women and young women in Mexico according to women's rights organizations. Many of these women and young women are torn from their lives by sex trafficking.
After these emotionally charged years, my body was deeply sad, haunted and filled with a sense of injustice that could not find words. This body which is also vulnerable in the streets of Mexico for being that of a woman.
So, I went to Tijuana - one of the international capitals of sex tourism, to express with my body what I could not say, to try to heal. Expressing with love the intrinsic freedom of the female body and the pain of absence, the pain of the violent reality. I wanted to pay tribute to women who no longer have a voice, carrying their memory within me.
Find in this land cut in two by an iron wall a damaged ally and in this ocean which returns irremediably to collide between the iron posts an ally of struggle.