Minimalist in resources and filmed from the unusual vantage point of a second-floor flat window, Malintzin 17 portrays two parallel expressions of parental care. For seven days and seven nights, filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky and his five-year-old daughter Milena watch a pigeon tending her chick in a dangerous tangle of electrical wires just outside their balcony. As the pigeon endures the cold, driving rain, Milena confusedly asks her father about the bird's location, its stillness, the significance - and dangers - of filming it, its true nature (Is it a robot?) and possible ways to help it (Does it need food? Will the chick learn to fly?). Wielding a hand-held camera from this elevated vantage point, parallel to that of the birds, the film constructs a microscopic but powerful environmental critique of nature's imprisonment within the aggressive infrastructures of modernity.

Directors: Eugenio Polgovsky and Mara Polgovsky
Production Companies: Tecolote Films, Piano
With the participation of: Eugenio Polgovsky and Milena Rose Polgovsky Tauss
Phase: Post-production
Year: 2022
Length: 64 min
Genre: Documentary
Language: Spanish