Our Body Is An Expanding Star
Semillites Hernández Velasco, Tania Hernández Velasco (Mexican/Mixtec/Popoloca) • 1h 24m • 2025 • Mexico • Spanish, English
Semillites and Tania, two queer siblings bound by a powerful friendship, journey through the brown terrain of their own bodies - lands they once rejected. They traverse landscapes of skin, dreams and viscera, crossing into places that pulse with their ancestors’ memory and, along the way, encounter a constellation of flowers, grasshoppers and fossils. Through collage, animation, manifesto, dance and intimacy, the film moves across scales of body and territory, reimagining identity beyond Mexico’s colonial narratives.
Director Statement (Abridged text)
We belong to the first urban generation of a family displaced from its peasant, Mixtec, and Popoloca roots, and grew up strategically distancing ourselves from our ancestors to survive, instead aspiring to an unattainable whiteness and cis-heteronormativity. However, as the Mixe linguist Yásnaya Aguilar explains, this displacement predates our parents’ migration by far: it stems from the Mexican state's project of cultural and linguistic whitening under the modern mestizo ideal. Like so many other uprooted people worldwide, our wounds resonate with fractured questions about belonging.
As des-Indigenized people, we cannot just undo all the displacements inscribed in our being, nor claim identities that do not belong to us. However, occupied territories—including bodies—can be reclaimed and nurtured again. Our film is convinced that healing is possible through cultivating rootedness: in siblinghood, family, territory, and the expanded genealogy of human and more-than-human beings who have sustained life despite centuries of violence and erasure. Cultivating kinship with them, through tenderness and imagination, is our way forward.
About Asinabka Festival
Tania Hernández Velasco:
Semillites Hernández Velasco:
Semillites Hernández Velasco:
Filmmaker and film educator based in Ciudad de México. Through intimate, collaborative, sensory, and speculative gestures, their films entangle and reimagine body, territory and identity in the center of so-called México. Through cinema, they seek to nurture expanded bonds of kinship between land, human and more-than-humanbeings. Director
Filmmaker and film educator based in Ciudad de México. Through intimate, collaborative, sensory, and speculative gestures, their films entangle and reimagine body, territory and identity in the center of so-called México. Through cinema, they seek to nurture expanded bonds of kinship between land, human and more-than-humanbeings. Director of “Titixe” (2018), “Eclipsis” (2022) and co-director of “Our Body Is An Expanding Star” (with Semillites Hernández Velasco, 2025) and the film installation “All that Has A Name Exists” (with Marina Lameiro, 2025). Their films have been screened in more than 60 International film festivals, including IDFA, Full Frame, BlackStar, Ann Arbor, Ambulante, FICUNAM, Biarritz, Festa del Cinema di Roma, Trieste, Black Canvas, etc.
Semillites Hernández Velasco:
Semillites Hernández Velasco:
Semillites Hernández Velasco:
Semillites is a Brown and Trans multidisciplinary artist and community arts worker based in Vancouver, Canada, on the Unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. He was born in Mexico City and migrated north at the age of nineteen. Working across film-making, drawing, DJing and animation. His practice is ro
Semillites is a Brown and Trans multidisciplinary artist and community arts worker based in Vancouver, Canada, on the Unceded territories of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam Nations. He was born in Mexico City and migrated north at the age of nineteen. Working across film-making, drawing, DJing and animation. His practice is rooted in celebrating imperfection that is expressed through self-portraiture. Semillites’ work is grounded in in-depth research into the cultural and social associations of color and guided by a commitment to collaborative practices. As an artist and cultural worker, he is dedicated to collaborating with and supporting migrant, BIPOC, and queer communities. Semillites work has been featured in Candian magazines and publications, like Room Magazine (2022) and he has collaborated with several non-profit organizations as well as art festivals both locally and nationally across Canada.
Dorina - Sueño Americano
Polaris Castillo (Indigenous Mexican American) • 3m • USA • 2026 • English, Spanish
Welcome to the land of the greed, the home of the debt, the American dream. When our taxes pay for kids in cages, a migrant street vendor, a social media influencer, and a billionaire must join forces to stop the almighty Eagle from keeping the world in complacent slumber.