Holding (2020)

The film is a collaboration between boxing and experimental punk communities in Mexico City. Pro and amateur boxers (active and retired) came together with experimental dancers, noise-makers and activists to create a fight scene. Structured within choreographed as well as improvised sequences, Holding sets rules and bodies off-balance, shifting identities of fighters and falling into a time pushed out-of-joint. The bout's percussive composition draws on boxing's corporal rhythms (including reproductions of sequences of punches from actual historical fights), blows become beats as fighting and dancing merge. Bodies switch and morph as the action unfolds. In one gory episode I face myself - a visceral expression of my experiences of Multiple Sclerosis - a chronic illness in which the body attacks its own central nervous system. In another section, a strange paranoid victory dance in a lake of blood undoes the inadequate binary of win/loose. The film begins and ends with two Mexican boxers who endlessly pick themselves up and dust themselves off to fight again. The pair, a professor and pupil; have dedicated their lives to pugilism, pinning all their hopes on the dream of making it. The circular nature of this fight narrative aims to lead the viewer into contemplation of the strange loops of failure/success. Conveying the blood n' guts-body through intimate cinematography and sound composition that responds to the rhythms of boxing, the viewer plunges into the slipperiness of desire and embodiment, circling spirals of self-reflexivity, weaving assertion, uncertainty, competition, power and weakness. Holding is accompanied by a small zine including a poem, stickers and drawings.