The Man Who Saw Too Much
(Mexico, 86 min.)
Dir. Trisha Ziff
Programme: Artscapes (International Premiere)
Mexican photographer Enrique Metinides is so impassioned about his work that he once snapped pictures in the midst of a heart attack. Metinides has been a photographer since as a child, he took shots of burning buildings from firemen’s shoulders. Eventually, he became a hugely successful tabloid photographer in a market that demands hyper-violent images.
Ziff’s moody doc, with a jazz score recalling Miles Davis’s for L’Ascenseur pour l’ échaufaud, grabs you with intriguing revelations about its protagonist. Now widely respected, Metinides’s pictures capture chaos as having surreal beauty. A truck balances crazily on a car roof; a remnant of a sign, OTEL, sticks out of a pile of rubble.
Acutely pained by the tragedies he’s witnessed, Metinides has often stopped shooting in order to help victims. In the doc’s intimate moments, he reveals self-protective measures like a wallet stuffed with icons. He owns a collection of lucky frogs, masks, dolls, and a roomful of toy fire trucks and ambulances that he meticulously dusts.
For this complex man whose exposure to horror began when he was a boy, his pictures are the “birth of a bad memory” and a reminder that chaos is always close by. Ziff’s doc probes the psyche of a man who has confronted horror since childhood and finds refuge in his inner child.
The Man Who Saw Too Much screens:
Please visit the POV Hot Docs hub for more coverage on this year’s festival.
Hot Docs runs April 28 – May 8. Visit www.hotdocs.ca for more information.
