Yovegami Ascona Mora’s Boca Vieja offers a sensitive and complex portrait of the director’s ancestral home in southern Mexico. The film lingers with equal care on the beauty of the sea and the beauty of the people who live alongside it, shaped by deep relationships to land and water. At the same time, the film traces the resilience of a community navigating the ebb and flow of daily life while resisting the persistent threat of territorial dispossession. Poetic and attentive, the film invites viewers to witness a living landscape where memory, place, and environmental change are deeply intertwined.

The sea is huge, the sea is a woman, the sea is delightful. Beautiful things are kept inside. She is a woman named Maria.

Yovegami Ascona Mora is a filmmaker from San Juan Guichicovi, Oaxaca. He has directed several short films about his community. With Sones Mixes en la Ciudad (2013), he won the Mexican national documentary competition Miradas sin Tiempo. With Mëët Naax (2014), he received the Best Short Film award at the national contest Hazlo en Corto. Los que están por nacer (2018) won the Best Short Film at the Morelia Indigenous Film Festival. Boca Vieja, his feature-length documentary debut, premiered at the 40th Guadalajara International Film Festival.