La Marea

La Marea (The Tide) is an essay documentary that depicts the life of Jorge, and his hometown in Seybaplaya, Mexico. Seybaplaya is a town sustained mainly by the fishing industry but is rapidly changing due to mass cargo fleets and the new oil platform. While these activities represent indirect economic growth, they also indicate a break in culture and resource consumption. Jorge represents the contemporary Mexican youth, whose hometowns are undergoing rapid changes by profit-driven industries. But rather than drive economic development, these changes force migration and displacement — Jorge’s dream of staying at home is the Mexican dream.

La Marea : La Corriente (The Tide : The Stream) is a web-based documentary interface that allows the spectator to restructure the narrative into a personal and serendipitous exploration of Seybaplaya. An immersive screening component highlights the space and transports the viewer to sit with Jorge and Miguel — a rendition of a fictitious and fantastical cinematic theater. La Marea, in its documentary form, has no fixed state. It rejects the placement of time and invites the viewer to let go into the stream. La Corriente is a platform for multiple portals to Seybaplaya, offering different sequences of information that allow each spectator to have a different experiential narrative. The project was developed by Miguel Novelo in collaboration with Jorge Carbajal, Carlos Camargo, Félix Ehuan, and CiNEOLA.

Without a doubt, this is a story of the tropical southeast of Mexico but conceived in the Bay Area, where innovation and media creation are embedded into the culture. The documentary was created as an interactive narrative since the beginning of the project, where viewers could either leave with a superficial view of Seybaplaya or decide to dive in, placing themselves in different moments in time, and only then, get a clearer picture of the life, space/time, and culture of the place. Only to again be disjointed by the short “social-media-esque” duration and multiplicity of the scenes. The tide would always stay in perpetual change, and so is life in Seybaplaya.