The American Egypt (57 min., 16mm B & W and color, 2001)
Directed by Jesse Lerner
starring Nelsy Ku Chay, Bartolomé Canché Uitz and Luis Gómez Ruz

winner, documentary prize, Jornada de Cortometraje, Cineteca Nacional,Mexico City

The American Egypt revisits the short life of the first socialist government of the Americas, the Revolution on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, 1915-1924.   Within the study of Mexico's past, the Yucatan merits consideration as a thing apart.   Attempts to secede in the 19th Century suggest Yucatan was, like Texas and California, only imperfectly attached to the Estados Unidos Mexicanos.   Until the middle of the 20th Century, neither highway nor railroad joined the Yucatan peninsula to the rest of the country.   Ties to the United States and the Caribbean were stronger than those to the rest of the nation. Years of totalitarian rule and reliance on a single-crop agriculture turned Mexico's poorest backwater into its richest.   The Revolution arrived late to the peninsula, but ultimately took on a much more radical form--one resembling the early days of the Soviet Union.   Under the governorship of Salvador Alvarado, the Yucatan hosted Mexico's first feminist congress (1916).   At a time when women in other parts of Mexico could not yet vote, the Yucatan elected women representatives and advanced a radical feminist agenda.   It was also in the Yucatan that Carlos Martínez directed the country's first feature-length fiction film.   That footage no longer exists (Mérida's hot and humid climate does not loan itself to archival preservation), but a reconstruction is incorporated into "The American Egypt" as a film within the film.   Mixing reenactments, found footage, landscapes and a host of vivid primary sources, "The American Egypt" explores incidents in the early history of globalization through the connections that link social revolution, silent cinema and the suffragette movement.

Jesse Lerner is a documentary film and video maker based in Los Angeles.   His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Sydney Biennale, the Sundance Film Festival, Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and other festivals and museums internationally.   His short films "Natives" (1991, with Scott Sterling), "T.S.H." (2003) and "Magnavoz" (2006) and feature-length documentaries "Frontierland/Fronterilandia"(1995, with Rubén Ortiz-Torres) "Ruins" (1999) and "The American Egypt" (2001) have won numerous prizes at film festivals in the United States, Latin America and Japan.   He has received grants and fellowships including the Western States Regional Media Arts Fellowship (N.E.A.), the California Arts Council fellowship, the Brody Family Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fideicomiso para la cultura México-EE.UU.   In addition to his work as a filmmaker, his critical essays on photography, film, and video have appeared in "Afterimage", "History of Photography" and "Wide Angle".   His books include "F is for Phony" (with Alex Juhasz) and "The Shock of Modernity" (forthcoming).   He has curated for the Robert Flaherty Seminar, the Centro Fotográfico Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Oaxaca, and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao.   He teaches in the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program at the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, California