A Tribute to the Fight Against Displacement
By Jeffrey Sipe and Nina Rodriguez
Appropriate housing—nearly as much as food—is an integral component of any society on earth today. Whether one lives in the remote regions of the Amazon or smack dab in the middle of Mexico City’s historic area, shelter, in the form of decent housing, is inarguably indispensable to human life. Yet, if it’s so indispensable, it’s reasonable to ask how acquiring, maintaining, and living in a suitable home has fallen victim to unbridled capitalist exploitation that results in those least capable of affording, acquiring, and maintaining a home being the first to be eliminated from the balance sheet.
Director Iria Gomez Concheiro (“The Cinema Hold Up”) tackles this issue in her 2021 feature “Before Oblivion” (“Antes del Olvido”), the story of a large, but old, apartment building in the center of Mexico City, as its inhabitants are suddenly confronted with eviction notices when the owner decides to tear it down and build a shopping mall in its place.
Concheiro makes a studied attempt to bring home the vast and diverse array of renters fighting displacement and the effects that evictions will have. The characters fighting to prevent eviction range from grandmothers who raised their children there to older men living with their grown sons to single mothers to a transvestite hairdresser to an out-of-work musician to a well-known boxer to a group of teenagers who are learning the ropes of activism that come with victories, defeats, and betrayals by those who ostentatiously offer their assistance.
As much as “Before Oblivion” details the battles and the tragedies of the residents, it is equally a call to action, a call for the people to combine their strengths to overcome their economic exploitation and the leeches who organize against them. Although the audience is given sufficient reason to sympathize with the residents, more important is the anger that it provokes in the viewer. The film is based in Mexico City, but the story it tells has become universal. Across the globe people are being thrown out of their apartments purely to enrich the owner, be it an individual or, increasingly, corporate title holders.
“Before Oblivion” is also a call for unity among Mexicans. The entire film is about conflict and exploitation and the two sides are clearly delineated. The courts, money-hungry landlords, corrupt lawyers, and the police are on one side, while nearly the entire spectrum of Mexican society is on the other. And as in the tales we’ve heard of teenagers in, say, communist-era Poland, Brazil in the ’60s and ’70s, or Vietnam during the war, Mexican teens are depicted as integral participants in the battle to save their homes and their neighborhood, acting both as caregivers and protestors.
In the end the film stands as both a tribute to the spirit of those fighting displacement and a condemnation of the people and institutions they are fighting against. It represents something of a microcosm of Mexican society, with all its inequities and brutal exploitation, alongside a very resilient compassion. Having played at many festivals and won the award for Best Mexican Feature at the Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF), “Before Oblivion” finally gets a release in Mexican theaters and is screening at Compartimento Cinematográfico in San Miguel de Allende.
