I spent most of my teenage years wandering. Strolling through the city, through its boulevards with my friends, seeing and watching people go by, being seen in return. And that was enough to shape our social sense, forge our clumsy analyses of our fellow citizens’ existence, and hone our urban survival skills.

The city, with all its faults, is at the heart of my cultural experience: it’s my father’s native megalopolis, Mexico City, it’s my horizon of existence, Montreal, it’s my discovery of the world, for better or for worse.

So it’s no coincidence that it’s become the driving force behind my creative thinking.

 With the films I’ve made, I’ve explored the urban theme in various forms, until wanting to see it beyond the visible.

After reflecting on the city as memory, the city as architecture and the city as politics, with Chronicle of a city I wanted to explore the idea that a city is also made up of mystery, subjectivity, stories and the imaginary.
As Italo Calvino put it, cities are the intimate reflection of our desires and fears. Cities are alive, moving and complex.
They are untamable, spirited entities that cannot be fully captured, and this is what makes a city unique, bewitching, the kind of city that inhabits us and intrudes even into our dreams.

Chronicle of a city is a kind of meditation in the form of a documentary essay, another milestone in my cinematic exploration of urbanity. Without wishing to state a thesis or attempt to apprehend it in its entirety, it’s a film that observes the effect of the increasing homogenization of cities and its undeniable impact on the environment, but in a kind of floating, a gliding that folds and unfolds, like a musical score, linking one city to another without regard for its specificities, as if we were crossing time and space.

It’s like wandering magically through the rich and precious encounters that the city allows us to discover every day.

Nadine Gomez.