Documentary: Mexico by IMAX

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Mexico is a place where time converges, where the past is present and all of history unfolds, or can unfold at the same time.

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The God of corn, was born in Tamoan Cham, a place of flowers, a new flower. The God of corn, was born in the place of rain and mist, where the sons of men are fashioned, where the precious fish are found.

In Mexico, stones are testaments to an ancient world, more than 3,000 years old, where numerous advanced civilizations flourished.

Empires with large cities and complex societies.

Olmecs, Toltecs, Zapotecs, Totonites, Aztecs and Maya.

Their knowledge of mathematics and astronomy and their artistic sensibility were the most advanced in the world.

As their sages explained, they knew how to measure time. Even the inner rhythms of their life cycle. The moon, the wind, the year, the day.

All moves forward, but also passes by.

All blood flows towards its resting place like power towards its throne.

It is said that their God came to speak to them. And when they left, they walked towards the face of the sun.

They took their black and red dyes, their codices and paintings. They took their wisdom them. They took everything with them.

Their books of songs and the music of their flutes.

At the beginning of the 16th century, they anxiously awaited the coming of the strangers foretold in their ancient prophecies.

Men with beards and white faces came, bringing firearms and horses, and they conquered those kingdoms in the name of the king of Spain and his God.

For 300 years, the Spanish extended their rule over the territory, exploiting its mines, its land and the labor of its people, making Mexico the richest colony of the Spanish empire.

The Spanish brought their religion, government, architecture, language and customs into the new lands.

But the roots of the ancient civilizations would not die, and a new society, the mestizo society, was born.

Uniting the old and new worlds in one people.

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Sauna. Hearing the Virgin of Guadalupe recall the Indian past. But they also evoke echoes of the Spanish presentation.

The new mestizo culture, mainly symbolized by the horse, spread to the countryside. The Mexican charos and their rodeos preserve the tradition of the first cowboys in the Americas.

Like all world powers, Spain believed that its empire would last forever.

In 1810, however, the cry for independence echoed throughout the land as Mexico proclaimed its sovereignty and its own identity.

During the 19th century, the young nation endured difficult civil wars in order to establish this identity and also had to defend itself against other, more powerful countries.

Mexico lost almost half of its territory in a war with the United States. And it nearly lost the Other half, when invaded by France.

Under the leadership of Benito Juarez, the nation established a government that asserted supremacy of civil power and separated church and state.

At the end of the 19th century, the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz consolidated the power of the state.

The repression within the country and the favorable world economic conditions allowed for the development of Mexico's abundant resources.

But the profits remained in the hands of a few.

Then, in 1910, the people rebelled. They demanded democratic elections, land and liberty.

More than 1 million Mexicans died in the struggle for justice.

The Mexican Revolution was an attempt to recognize the entirety of Mexico's cultural identity, none of whose parts could be sacrificed.

As Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico's foremost contemporary writers, explains, today, the revolutionary movement of all Mexicans creates a new age, the age of mutual recognition, accepting all that we have been and giving value to each and every contribution that makes Mexico a multicultural nation in a world that is in itself becoming more and more varied and complex.

No longer can we mask our Indian, mestizo, European faces. They are all ours.

Mexico is today a country with over 90 million people, a country of many faces, where a rapid economic development has outpaced its institutions, creating.

Creating new contrasts and imbalances.

As in every stage of history, this tension between the dynamics of modernization and traditional values once again implies an adjustment between the past and the present.

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Mexico has the genius of survival. A country ancient and new, eternally called upon by the past and the future, by the traditional and the modern, but capable in exceptional moments in our history of facing both.

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Mexico is a country where the earth never rests, and from its entrails spring sources of natural energy and mineral wealth.

Riches that today, as in centuries past, continue to be transformed by people using modern and ancient technologies, uniting tradition with development.

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Education and restoration, the care and recovery of all the cultural heritage are guided by the memory of how much has been accomplished and the realization of how much is left to do to give life, memory and hope to our inherited civilizations.

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Every autumn, the monarch butterflies return to their ancestral wintering grounds to complete their life cycle, carrying, the ancients believed, the souls of the dead.

A flowered butterfly, fluff, fluttering among us, sips the nectar from our flowers, wrote an Aztec poet.

Where will I go? Where will I go? We'll all go. We'll all go to the house of the sun.

O flowers that we carry oh, songs that we bear we are going to the kingdom of mystery

at least for one day we are together, my friends we must leave our flowers we must leave our songs and with that the earth will remain.

My friends, let us rejoice Rejoice, friends.

Mexican culture does not distinguish between life and death. All is life. Death is only a part of life and not not the final part, only another beginning.

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In Mexico, native cultures give value to the care of nature, to the world of ritual and myth, and to the sense of community that perhaps our modern world needs to be more complete.

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In recent years, explains Carlos Fuentes, many have become more aware of what those persons close to the murmur of the earth and the movements of the soul have always known.

Nothing completely dies. The deceit of progress has been to tell us that we can leave behind who we were.

The greatness of Mexico is that the past is always alive, not as a load or a burden, except perhaps for the crudest modernized minds.

Memory and desire know that there is no living present when the past is dead. Nor can there ever be a future without both.

Mexico exists in the present. Its awakening is now because it has not forgotten its rich, vibrant past, an unburied memory.

Its future is also now because the strength of its living dream has not diminished.

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It rained emeralds and the flowers were born, Sang Moctezuma, king of the Aztecs. This is your song, and when you nurture it in Mexico, even the sun shines brighter.

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