Synopsis
On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myths and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply.
A word from Tënk
I first caught Andrea Bussman’s Fausto at Locarno in 2018. That year it received an honourable mention by the “Filmmakers of the Present” jury. I personally think it should have received much more attention and acclaim. It is a film I often return to with deep admiration — a work so formally assured and conceptually rich that it feels quietly revolutionary. Set on the Oaxacan Coast and born out of a simple gesture — a gifted camcorder and the suggestion to make something while on holiday — Bussman’s film unfolds into a layered, hallucinatory meditation on knowledge, power, and storytelling. Shot digitally on a Sony a7s and later transferred to 16 mm, the film drifts through liminal spaces, where myth bleeds into history and fiction curls up alongside anthropology. Drawing from Goethe’s Faust, local legends, and Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (a production she once saw performed by the Wooster Group), Bussman constructs a voiceover that is both spectral and seductive — carried by Gabino Rodríguez’s haunting narration, which lingers over the images like an incantation. The result is a film that engages anti-imperialist thought with a quiet force, reflecting on the colonial legacy of the region, on electricity and enlightenment, on the desire to know and the cost of that desire. Bussman’s careful pre-production research and her intuitive formal choices reveal a commitment to a new kind of cinema — one that refuses the extractive gaze and instead lets stories shimmer and disintegrate like sand. Shadows stretch across the screen, time slips, and what emerges is a radically poetic vision of what cinema can do when it listens. As Bussman writes: “To work with the cinematic medium is to create multiple ways of seeing through formal exploration. How do we understand being in relation to technology and perception? What is the relationship between the virtual and reality in cinema? How do images deceive? Is there a relation to the real that produces satisfaction? How can we gain knowledge through perception?”
Sofia Bohdanowicz
Filmmaker
