The Proposal (2018) by Jill Magid is now available online through Collecteurs. To access click here.
“The Proposal” is Jill Magid’s first feature film and is part of a larger project that she began in 2013 titled “The Barragán Archives”. The project explores the contested legacy of Luis Barragán, Mexico’s most famous architect, and how his legacy is affected by the fact that a private corporation, Vitra, owns his archives and controls the rights in his name and work. For more than twenty years, this corporation has made Barragán´s work inaccessible to the public.
The film questions whether a single actor should be exclusively in control of how the world can engage with Barragán’s work. Jill Magid captures the overwhelming beauty of his work while simultaneously questions the legal challenges one faces to do so. A way to elicit dialogue about access to legacy and its proprietary nature. In addition of these pressing social issues, there is another reflection on mortality and on the relationship of the artist's body to his body of work. Mortality permeates the aging of architecture and the intimate presence of three generations of the Barragán family. Intertwined with these pressing social questions is a quieter rumination on mortality and the relationship of the artist’s body to his or her body of work. In the film, mortality permeates in the aging of the architecture and within the intimate presence of three generations of the Barragán family.
Jill Magid wanted to present legacy as something potentially alive, and full of possibility. Transforming ashes into a diamond is an expression of possibility.
