Streamed online July 7 through July 13
By chance one day, filmmaker Nuria Giménez unearthed 50 reels of old home-movie footage as she was poking around in her late grandfather’s effects. Not only were these remarkable reels a pleasant surprise, they were also carefully labeled and categorized and appeared to be in fine condition. Giménez decided to digitize the entire archive, ultimately learning that her newly found footage detailed the lives and times of her Swiss ancestors, and their vacation treks and voyages from the late 1940s to the 1960s. But what she decided to do with the footage made Giménez’s find so fascinating. The “excerpts from Vivian Barrett's diary,” as she portrays it in My Mexican Bretzel (a variant of the German word for pretzel), is in reality an imaginative script inspired by the moving images but invented by the filmmaker as she turns her relatives into characters in a new, wholly believable, and mesmerizing narrative. (Nuria Giménez, 2019, 74 minutes)