In 1985, a terrible earthquake brought life in the city to a halt, razing majestic buildings to the ground and symbolically destroying the historic city centre. Rather than showing archive images or letting people recite unsettling narratives of the disaster, in our experimental documentary, we explored this event’s impact on the collective sense of time of the contemporary society of Mexico City. Our film follows an experimental approach based on filming long shots of the reflection of a mirror which thus becomes both a tool and the message. The reflection is turned into a metaphor for the inextricable superimposition of past and the present, also altering a society’s perception of the future. The earthquake itself lasted only two minutes but left its scars in the people’s minds. It happened all of a sudden but changed everything forever. The longer it dates back the more certain it becomes that a new one looms ahead. And yet, nothing could ever convey how exactly those two minutes must have felt.

The entire production of this film, from shooting to post-production, was realised within 100 hours during the DocsDF International Documentary Film Festival of Mexico City, by Michael Dieminger and Maxie Jost.