Hello friends,

Welcome to micro~ondas. 

This is the first of what I plan to be a monthly/bimonthly newsletter of personal musings and updates, recent work, and a section of links to upcoming events/workshops/in-person meetings/etc. that I’m excited about (por ahora en inglés, planeo que sea bilingüe a partir del próximo).

I’d like to start by stating the obvious: this year is off to a bad start. Only three weeks in, 2026 has been defined by escalating violence, cruelty, and rage. 

On a personal level I have been angrier recently than at any other time in my life. If I had to choose one word to say what I have been angry about, it would be bureaucracy. Bureaucracy in the sense of spending the last two years navigating the cruelly unnavigable US medical care system as my dad’s appointed caregiver. Bureaucracy in the sense of going on a decade of living an international life, and watching the ways that those living international lives are being increasingly observed, threatened and abused; their rights violated and lives upended. Bureaucracy in the sense of Kafkian absurdity, of being told that the violence we are seeing is not actually violence, that language doesn’t mean what it means. Bureaucracy in the sense of witnessing the push of AI and data collection into every part of our work and lives. Bureaucracy in the sense of the wheels being so fine-tuned to keep the system steered towards war and profiteering that no one seems to be able to re-direct it, even when staying the course means the system’s own demise. 

About a year ago I realized that the stress of caring for my dad alongside all of this anger was having an impact on my body and brain. I was tense all the time, and uncharacteristically short-fused. I found myself yelling too frequently at Kaiser representatives on the phone. I was forgetting appointments regularly, always losing track of my belongings. My arms were tired from being constantly taught, as if poised to run. I remember telling my brother that it felt like I had “too many tabs open in my brain.”

I spent the large part of 2025 sitting with this anger, trying to qualify it in the hopes of retaining some sort of control. I began keeping a health diary, a short daily check-in of how I was feeling physically and mentally. I made an effort to spend less time on social media. I began taking 15 minutes of every day to meditate, and have against all odds kept it up for over a year, which I attribute to meditation being a truly powerful tool and the only intervention that has concretely and undeniably helped. 

Surprisingly, I am thus beginning 2026 feeling more ready to meet the moment than I did beginning 2025. I feel present and capable of moving toward action. As this essay published by journalist Dan Sinker on recent organizing in Minneapolis so clearly expresses, anger often comes from feeling frustrated and isolated, and is best diffused by channeling it toward action, both individual and collective. This is nothing new, but it is one thing to say the words and another to commit to the practice. 

Since graduating in December from a masters program in Film Preservation in the Basque Country (more on that below) and returning to Mexico City, I have been thinking about what forms channeling new anger will take for me this year. For one, I plan to be writing more. I am currently keeping a diary titled “What I Heard about Trump” based on Eliot Weinberger’s 2005 collage-like essay “What I Heard about Iraq”. I plan to be offline more, and to make a point of hosting—and being present at—more in-person events, particularly discussions and workshops. The first week of 2026, I was glad to be able to attend an open mic listening session at Polilla Librería where the audience (all from Latin America besides myself and one European) shared thoughts and listened to others in the aftermath of the US invasion of Venezuela. The session began with a reading of this essay (English/Spanish) by Venezuelan artist Pablo E. Peña of his experience of hearing the bombs drop. I was able to attend a meeting of the Trabajadorxs del Cine por Palestina (Film Workers for Palestine) group last fall, and plan to attend more this year. Last week, I went to see Françoise Vergès and Sayak Valencia speak about contemporary forms of violence and racial capitalism at Index Art Book Fair. I’ve also joined an AI Skeptics book club and Signal channel lead by Ali Alkhatib that absolutely rules, and we are currently on the second chapter of this book about anti-fascist approaches to resisting AI. If interested, you can sign up here. 

In short, I do not look forward to this year—or the next for that matter—in hopes of it being materially or spiritually better than the last. I do hope, however, that we can learn to better organize, better rely on and be there for one another, and better shape the future into a form meant to support and sustain us all. 

THINGS I HAVE BEEN WORKING ON:

I spent the last 16 months studying for a masters in Film Preservation Studies at the Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola in Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain. I began the program in 2023, but after my dad’s health emergency I spent much of 2024 in California caring for him and began the program again in the fall. In the interim, I decided to change my thesis project to a documentary film about my dad. This is my first attempt at making a feature-length film. It is very much a work-in-progress, and I would love any feedback as I wade through further research, applying to residencies, and editing this year. I’ll share a rough cut next time, be in the meantime you can see a 3-minute intro to the film here.

I was thrilled to work on my first sound restoration for film with preservationist and fellow archive student Jorge Jaramillo. Jorge’s thesis project was a digital restoration of the Costa Rican filmmaker Kitico Moreno’s 1975 documentary A propósito de la mujer, a 36-minute B&W film that blends inventive surrealist scenes with interviews with women of various social classes speaking about the realities of their lives. I have worked in sound design for radio for over 10 years, but I had never worked on a film project. I loved learning about the differences in thinking about the two forms, and how much our perception of sound changes in a large, dark room, and with the interplay of images. The film will be premiering in Europe soon, and I am so sad I won’t be able to be there. Immense congratulations to Jorge.

Being part of writer and curator Elisa Juri’s thesis project lunars was also a highlight of last year. Lunars was a semi-regular meeting in which our ~8 person group would engage with films selected by Elisa through collective writing experiments, with the resulting pieces being so cut-up, collab-ed, and re-worked between participants that it became unclear whose writing was whose. Elisa often struggled at defining what lunars was, and I think it was because the project so emphasized the process of writing over the product that defining it was impossible—and also  perhaps beside the point. You just had to be there.

While at EQZE I was part of an investigation group that worked with a deposit of 340 films from the ZINEBI (Bilbao International Festival of Documentary and Short Film) festival archive stored at the Basque Film Archive. The collection includes 45 films from Latin America, mostly produced after 1968. It also includes some films produced in the United States on topics concerning Latin America, such as US interventionism and militarism. In this article I wrote about two of those films, School of the Americas, School of Assassins (1994), and El Salvador, Another Vietnam (1981), and the US-based film restoration campaign IndieCollect that has enabled both directors’ works to be screened again. Susan Sarandon also makes an appearance.

EVENTS/WORKSHOPS/LINKS/ETC.

For a few months this year I was part of a group that met online once a week for 90 minutes to spend time working individually on digital security. A session format usually went: 10 minutes at the beginning sharing what each person would spend the time working on; 45 min—1 hour of working on it; ~20 minutes of closing comments/what was learned/goals for next time. It fizzled out over the summer, so I would like to start a new group. Please reach out if you are interested in joining or co-hosting these sessions. I’m hoping to organize one in Spanish and one in English, at times that could potentially include people in both the Americas and European time zones, with the option of meeting in person as well if you’re in CDMX. This is an example of the kinds of things one might think about working on: https://disconnect.blog/getting-off-us-tech-a-guide/

The new year is the time for lists, for better and often for worse. One list I’ve enjoyed is this list of over 100 lists made by Mexican filmmakers, curators, critics, and aficionados of their favorite films watched in 2025, both recent and older films they had re-discovered last year, or seen for the first time. There is even a breakdown of most mentioned films and corresponding data sheet. I particularly liked seeing the selections of not-so-recent films, and the lists of friends, like Diandra Arriaga, whose inclusion of Kazuhiro Soda’s 2010 film Peace inspired me to watch it last week. I wholeheartedly agree it deserves a place on a list. 

Until next time,

Claire

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