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Comitiva Patronal de la Imagen / ABES
Eight years of filming. Six young dancers. ABES's award-winning documentary comes to the Comitiva Patronal de la Imagen — the same collective building Oaxaca's first community cinema.
By
Mish Dary
Director de Qué Onda Oaxaca
There's an image that repeats across Oaxaca, one that rarely makes it into the tourist brochures: a seventeen-year-old sitting on the curb, surrounded by mototaxis and tlayuda stands, scrolling through their phone like they're looking for something to explain why they're here and not somewhere else.
It's not despair. It's waiting. Breaking La Vida understands exactly that.
The documentary by Mexican filmmaker Abraham Escobedo-Salas (ABES) followed for eight years the story of six young dancers who found in breaking and hip-hop culture far more than an artistic discipline: a space to build friendships, face loss, take on responsibility, and discover who they wanted to become as adults.
More than a documentary about dance, Breaking La Vida is an intimate portrait of growth, identity, and the search for a place in the world. 92 minutes, rated for all audiences.
Since its premiere, Breaking La Vida has traveled through major national and international film festivals, earning recognition that matters:
If you follow Qué Onda Oaxaca, you already know that the Comitiva Patronal de la Imagen is building Oaxaca's first community cinema in the Central de Abastos — with backing from FOCINE and IMCINE, grown from an audiovisual training project that started during the pandemic.
But before the walls are ready, they're already screening.
That says everything about how they understand their role: not as cultural administrators waiting for infrastructure, but as a community that activates the space with what it has. This screening aims to bring together documentary film lovers and members of the urban dance, hip-hop, and youth culture communities.
The reality facing young people in neighborhoods like Libertad, Ciudad Jardín, or San Martín Mexicapam isn't so different from what the documentary portrays: migration, informality, structural violence, the constant pressure from a family that can't afford for their kid to "study something weird."
Art doesn't fix any of that. But it does something just as important: it tells you that your experience exists, that it's worth narrating, that others lived it too — and found in movement, in dance, in cinema, a place where the world makes sense for a while.
This context isn't far from what youth face in any Latin American periphery. The question is always the same: what do you do when the system doesn't account for you? Some migrate. Some stay and bend. Some find the floor, the moves, and their people.
Spaces like the Comitiva's aren't just screening rooms. They're, literally, refuges.
General admission: $50 MXN | Students & seniors: $25 MXN
Information: 951 233 4518
Neighborhood cinema — screenings where people walk in, where neighbors meet, where the screen isn't inside a mall or behind a two-hundred-peso ticket — has a tradition in Mexico that we almost lost in the nineties to multiplexes.
What the Comitiva Patronal de la Imagen is doing is reclaiming that tradition. And Breaking La Vida is exactly the kind of film that only works when you watch it surrounded by people who understand what they're seeing without anyone having to explain it.
That doesn't happen at Cinépolis.
Going? Share this article so more people in the area find out — and follow the Comitiva on Instagram @comitivapatronaldelaimagen.
📷 Photography used for informational/curatorial purposes only. Images are not the property of the author or Qué Onda Oaxaca. Credits belong to their respective authors.
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— Mish Dary :)
Director de Qué Onda Oaxaca
