Volcano Cinema: Of Eruptions and Other Stories is a season showcasing the diverse ways volcanoes have been documented and reimagined through film. Displacing the central role of the disaster movie, the programme approaches volcanoes and their metaphoric power from different landscapes, cultural mythologies, and with potency and provocation.

📅 25th Nov, 6.15pm

📍DCA, Dundee

Film: Pobo ‘tzu’ / White Night 

Director: Tania Ximena Ruiz and Yóllotl Alvarado

82 min | Docufiction | 2021| México

Language: Zoque (English Subtitles)

Screening of Pobo ‘tzu’/White Night, with an introduction by Charlotte Gleghorn and Amelia Bain (Ixchel Research Team)

Synopsis: In 1982, the Chichonal volcano erupted, burying numerous villages, including the Zoque community of Esquipulas Guayabal. Years later, the inhabitants of Nuevo Guayabal rebuild their lives as the volcano and the buried village lurk in the undergrowth. Trinidad, a poet born on the day of the eruption, has dreamlike visions that quickly spread through his community, sparking a collective effort to unearth the ancient village, while the presence of the Piowachue (the spirit of the volcano in the Zoque cosmovision) grows stronger among the community.

About the programme

Volcanoes have persistently ignited the imagination and have been construed filmically since cinema’s beginnings. In 1902, Georges Méliès recreated an eruption in the actuality film Éruption volcanique à la Martinique, a 1-minute simulation of Mount Pelée built from cardboard and flashing lights. A recent cycle of theatrical releases, including Into the Inferno (Werner Herzog, 2016) and Fire of Love (Sara Dosa, 2022), exploring volcanoes, their enthusiasts, and audiovisual traces invites us to contemplate them anew.

This season of films initiates a reflection on the relationship between humans and volcanoes, their agency, and resistant ways of envisaging their power and eruptive activity. The programme features highly metaphoric and figurative explorations to explicit engagements with the scientific, political, and territorial discourses of living within a volcano’s reach.

This series of events takes place in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh, between the 25th of November and 7th of December 2024. The season is a collaboration between CinemaAttic and the Ixchel project, sponsored by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and hosted at University of Edinburgh.

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Each screening will feature a trailer for the upcoming feature film Cordillera, co-produced by the Ixchel project, in collaboration with the Guatemalan production company La Casa de Producción, and director Jayro Bustamante.