Sabina's Shadow

We wanted to discover the incredible. To know what a shaman was. To meet magic. We wanted to see the magicians, or to see the encounters with beings of light, with angels, and with Gods. The fact is that we were being consumed by a zone that seemed to have a life of its own. And nobody realized that. I know that this story can not be told here, like this, with written words. And I also know that, should not be told, we may be breaking with the hermetic code. But yes, this story was made beyond this earth, in other worlds.

All peoples have heroes, human beings who stopped being themselves, to become what others need. It seems that heroes are as necessary as a tree is. Even, perhaps, there can be no future without a hero. And because there are no schools to become heroes, one must be chosen, to be the only one, someone who manages to sustain others when the abyss of life seems to consume existence. In Huautla de Jiménez there is a very particular heroine, an almost mythological being, Maria Sabina, a woman who went down in history for her healing practices, helped by the power of the "Little Saints". The weight of his figure is such that there is a story before and after her. She performed ceremonies where incredible events occurred, talked with beings from beyond, danced and toasted with them drinking sugar cane aguardiente, had supernatural powers, predicted the future, unveiled the past and resurrected the dead. Today, 35 years after his death, his spirit is still alive. In the current ceremonies, the altars have images of her, people invoke her, and they can also see her from time to time. María Sabina is already a well-established mantra. However, I did not want to make a story about her, what interested me was what she had left behind, the consequence, her shadow. The spectrum of that shadow was much vaster than I imagined, the truth is that we faced the very infinite, the roads that open up when consuming the "Little Saints" are not only unexpected and uncontrollable, but also immeasurable. This film is my attempt to capture my beliefs of the beyond, taking Huautla's shamans as a starting point. Being me, in some way, a student who wants to start a trip, with or without return, and come back with a story to tell. The film we have today, is in the bubble of visual anthropology, also, in the performatic art with the experimentation of my own physical body, and it contains the sensorial virtue that gives us the true Cinema.

And as is already known, history always likes to return, and sometimes overreacted. Today, Huautla de Jiménez is a sacred place where consecrated healers exist and make good use of medicine, but it is also a market of psychedelic experiences; The amount of people who claim to be shamans is really incredible. To make this film, we had to find a future shaman and observe him closely, and we also had to enter the market to experience the variables. The story was recorded to be able to tell it, the questions are there, and the answers, hopefully, our grandchildren will find them.