For this short, my point of departure was the Comcaac community and their ancestral
basket weaving. The Comcaac (also known as "Seris") are an Indigenous community on
Sonora's Mar de Cortés coast, numbering fewer than a thousand and among the last to
maintain a truly nomadic desert-and-sea way of life.
Working as a solo filmmaker, I was introduced to a community that seemed to be held
together by its women, who spoke a language I'd never heard before: Cmiique Iitom.
In my previous experience working with Indigenous communities in Mexico, I've
learned it's better to interview subjects in their native language as it tends to hold farmore depth and ancestral knowledge than what surfaces when you push them to speak
Spanish. For this film, Ana María was gracious enough to answer and work in her
mother tongue. I wasn't looking for a logical explanation of how she weaves her
baskets (though the process itself is remarkable), I was after something only
documentary allows: a leap of faith, listening to someone answer in a language you
don't understand and trusting it will make sense later. I was also struck by her singing; I later learned the Comcaac have specific songs for the elements; one for the desert,one for the wind, one for the ocean, one for the sun.
A couple of months later, I received the Spanish translation from one of the
community's teachers, and I was amazed. Not only had Ana María stayed away from
the logic of basket weaving, she had gone deep into the paranormal and folkloric
beliefs woven into the tradition itself. That gap, between what I heard and what I
understood, turned out to be the film.
In the end, the Comcaac baskets are never just baskets, they are vessels. Vessels for
seeds, for fruit, for seafood, for babies, for water, and, in some cases, for stories that seem to belong in other worlds.
