What Does It Mean to Care Collectively?: In Conversation with Filmmakers Ivonne Serna and Selim Benzeghia

The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Mahābhārata, and the Rāmāyaṇa – the most canonical epics of literature in world history arguably share a commonality: the hero and a sole journey. Johannes A. B. van Buitenen, Simona Sawhney, Gabriel Germain, and Nicholas Justin Allen, for instance, recognise the parallels. Symmetries were drawn between Arjuna and Odysseus, the former’s exile and the latter’s journey, Indrapastha and Ithaca, Penelope and Draupadī, and the divinity of protagonists. 

Both Rama and Krishna are Hindu deities and descendants of Vishnu. Homeric epics were believed to have held religious significance, then later a subjugated role of heroic narrative due to the placating of its sacred dimensions during the advent of Christianity. Heroism arguably historically centres the narrative of cinema and literature around a sole entity; further cemented by the conceptualisation around a protagonist – a word which traces its etymology to Ancient Greek meaning the chief actor. 

An enduring Indigenous nation in Mexico known as the P’urhépecha people, however, begets a different understanding of a central narrative, and questions the portrayal of a single deified entity. Alas, stories need not come from deities but the people. The P’urhépecha, meaning “the people”, recounts a history that spanned a millennium prior to the Spanish conquest. They have existed alongside the Maya, Aztec, Olmec, and other Mesoamerican civilisations. Filmmakers Ivonne Serna and Selim Benzeghia prove there need not be a single face to a hero nor a solitary journey for a story to be told in Enraizados (Our Roots Remain) (2025). The story of Enraizados belongs to the P’urhépecha people and the film is co-owned by the P’urhépecha nation.

In a self-governing community of Cherán, a P’urhépecha indigenous town located in Michoacán, Mexico, Serna and Benzeghia were welcomed to the community by going through the process of obtaining consent from every single of the town’s neighborhood communal councils.  Benzeghia, with one previous documentary entitled A Slide and Barbed Wire (2023) under his belt, and Serna, with her footholds in environmental storytelling, climate negotiations, and filmmaking – the two uncovered the burgeoning weight of responsibility and care as filmmakers with Cherán.  

“I only did one documentary prior [to Enraizados], which was about the detention of immigrant children in France, as someone with a Franco-Algerian background, migration wasn’t abstract to me, but the process of making this film was different because it was participatory not only with the protagonists but with the entire community,” said Benzeghia. “Documentary filmmaking has come from such a Westernised point of view where there is a huge emphasis on individuality. Like Selim was saying, [the narrative] centers around someone saving everyone, while everyone else is just passive. I feel like it’s simply not true for places like Cherán,” said Serna. The two were reflecting on how their collaborator, the entire community of Cherán, made them approach filmmaking differently.

Each frame in Enraizados lingers on the people who recounted the story of their lives, intertwined with their community. From Cherán’s struggle in 2011 under organised crime and forestation-induced violence, Enraizados immortalised portraits of the communal resistance that percolated throughout the documentary. “This film is the property of the Cherán community,” explained Benzeghia. “In the process of getting access to making this film, we had to pass through every neighborhood council where every citizen, every person of the community can come and say something about the fact that we want to make this [documentary].”

The process lasted for two to three weeks, and both filmmakers were offered suggestions on how the film should come about through the horizontal leadership of the community. “Filmmaking is co-ownership. And now it’s also a tool for them,” Benzeghia said, referring to the copy of the film the community has in their library. 

Former member of Council of the Commons, Genoveva Pedroza Ramírez, who was integral to the 2011 rebellion against illegal logging in Cherán, said “[to] nurture a greater awareness of care” is imperative. “Our work on Enraizados focused on caring for and protecting the forest – on why it must be safeguarded.” The film’s narrative driver is the unwavering strength and resilience of care. “A lot of it comes from the sense that it was a movement led by women,” explained Serna. “Cherán is different from many other places in Mexico because of that. Mexico is still a very patriarchal society where women tend to be restricted to a lot of traditional gender roles. But it wasn’t like that in P’urhépecha culture. I think that brings ecofeminism and land stewardship [to the forefront].”

Environmental engineer Francisco Sánchez Macías, who took part in Enraizados, said the film depicted “only a small part of the social struggles that people face every day around the world”. In Cherán, the community actively refuses to be subjugated to ecological exploitation. And although the ongoing struggle is complex and nuanced – it is the most authentic form of care borne out of responsibility to future generations. The film culminated in Cherán’s harvest party where everyone in the community came together to celebrate the end of a cycle. 

Enraizados reframes the way one thinks and interacts with documentary and filmmaking. The story, which belongs to the P’urhépecha, documented by Serna and Benzeghia, co-owned, and co-participated by the community of Cherán, is one of care – oftentimes in a world where the act of caring for the collective with one’s every fibre and minutiae is deemed contradictory to one’s survival, the act of caring may appear overbearing. Enraizados argues: what appears overbearing is rather the desensitisation to the absence of care for the collective. Thus, there is no one face or name to Cherán’s sovereign movement, similar to how there is no one face or name to the existence, resilience, and endurance of the P’urhépecha people whose roots remain firmly planted and their understories evergreen. 

Enraizados postulates that perhaps the current language and mainstream literacy around care has been hijacked into one that perpetuates fearmongering around collective action. One must ask: if an Indigenous people that flourished beyond millennia practices communal care so ardently, then perhaps the act of caring is most natural, and undoubtedly most humane. The film carves out no particular face to heroism nor romanticises the devastation of violence and conflict; it merely documents a present-day history that is kind, common, and communal.



Feature image: Still from Enraizados (Our Roots Remain) (2025). Courtesy of Ivonne Serna and Selim Benzeghia