Filmmaker and visual artist

Many of you will have been deeply saddened to hear of the sudden death of Eugenio Polgovsky who was Fellow in the Creative Arts at Trinity College and a friend many of us at MML.

Staff at MML and the Centre for Film and Screen would like to express our deepest sympathy and condolences to Eugenio’s family.

Eugenio Polgovsky was an independent filmmaker and cinematographer. He worked on the production of documentaries focused on the struggles for survival of people in rural areas of Mexico and explored the lives of those that the mass media renders invisible. Through detailed visual portraits, he exposed and questioned the contradictions of humanity and its ideas of civilisation and progress.  Polgovsky was the author of the feature films Tropic of Cancer, The Inheritors, Mexican Ritual, Resurrection and the short film A Leap of Life. The MoMA in New York presented Tropic of Cancer as one of the region’s most innovative contemporary films (2006).  His films have been featured in Cannes Film Festival, (2005) 65th Biennale of Venice (2008), Berlin Film Festival (2009) and have received the support of the Hubert Bals fund of the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Through an innovative and poetic visual language, combined with an editing style that empowers the image, Polgovsky constructed his narratives upon metaphors. His films explored new possibilities of expression within cinema and sound design, and his work as visual artist investigated the borders between nature and urbanity, animality and machines.

He was a graduate of the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City and founder of Tecolote Films. He received more than 30 film awards worldwide, including 4 Mexican Academy "Ariel" and the Joris Ivens prize in the Festival Cinema du Réel in 2005.