100 Ways to Cross the Border

Amber Bay Bemak / Mexico, United States / 2022 / 84 min
100 Ways to Cross the Border 100 Ways to Cross the Border 100 Ways to Cross the Border 100 Ways to Cross the Border 100 Ways to Cross the Border
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  • BFI London Film Festival

  • DocLisboa Int'l Film Festival

  • BAMcinemaFest

  • NewFest New York’s LGBTQ+ Film Fest

  • Athens Int'l Film Festival

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Synopsis

English and Spanish with English and Spanish subtitles

With Guillermo Gómez-Peña

At a time when there is more and more news in the mainstream media about the U.S.-Mexico border, 100 Ways to Cross the Border (2022) presents the work and philosophical frameworks of an artist who has had a sustained dedication to radical, highly impactful, and innovative artistic interventions on the border. This vibrant documentary explores the 40-year career of prolific Latinx performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña as he enacts his interventions by “queering the border-” claiming all borders as queer and liminal spaces.
‘I’ve been fighting to control my image for only 40 years and the fight never ends!’, notes Gómez-Peña ironically, turning the camera for a moment on the film’s director Amber Bay Bemak, reversing the gaze. The moment encapsulates their life as a Mexican/Chicanx performance artist, activist, and founder of the trans-disciplinary arts organization La Pocha Nostra (LPN), as well as Bemak’s approach as a documentary filmmaker.

Gómez-Peña and Bemak attempt to queer all sorts of borders – not only territorial but also those relating to race, gender, sexuality, and even filmmaking. With intimacy and honesty, this film shares Gómez-Peña and LPN’s ethos and practice, creating an open space for collaboration both behind and in front of the camera, resulting in a work that embodies LPN’s multi-centric and fluid approach to narrative.

An ideal film to screen during Hispanic Heritage Month, 100 Ways to Cross the Border celebrates Gómez-Peña and the contributions his radical, queer, anti-colonial art has made to conversations around border thinking, gender politics, and Latinx identity.
Original score by Guillermo Galindo.
Related Subjects
About the Director
Amber Bay Bemak is a filmmaker, artist, and educator. Her work is based on experimental and documentary films, and draws from cinematic practice, pedagogy around ethics of representation, queer theory and lived experience, a deep commitment to a global perspective, and Buddhist philosophical frameworks and cultures.

Amber Bay Bemak - 100 Ways to Cross the BorderAvailable for Q&As, Masterclasses, and workshops upon request.
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For the past two decades, Amber has been engaged in a multi-layered exploration of performance and film which uses the body as a sight for socio-political inquiry, engages with text, language, and translation to open up discourse around deeply embedded colonization narratives, and commits to linking the intimate and personal with larger institutional structures.

Amber’s work has been seen at venues, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, the Schwules Museum, and the Tamayo Museum. Festivals include Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, DocLisboa, Morelia, and the European Media Art Festival. She has taught film theory and practice in India, Nepal, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States.

Additionally, Amber worked as a producer, director, cinematographer, editor, and sound designer on over 30 films in collaboration with production companies, television stations, nonprofit organizations, and commissioned art projects. Her first feature-length documentary, 100 Ways to Cross the Border (2022), explores the work of artist Guillermo Goméz-Peña and his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra.

Press

“A playfully provocative delve into the work of performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his dance/art troupe La Pocha Nostra, Amber Bemak’s engagingly breezy and busy documentary manages to offer plenty of insight into culture and politics while also playfully blurring the line between filmmaker and subject.” – Mark Adams , Business Doc Europe

“A tantalising compilation of provocations. Each performance is an agitation against unfreedom, each tactic a crossing of borders into a potentially better beyond. There may not be one hundred ways on offer, but that’s probably because the film wants the viewer to create their own—to join in on the fun. One hundred is low, if that’s the case. Why don’t we shoot for one thousand?” – Bomb Magazine

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