These two programs bring together the experimental documentaries of Los Angeles-based professor/writer/curator Jesse Lerner, whose films often mix original material with found imagery and sounds, and related rarities from the archives of Lerner's production company The American Egypt. The films reflect on Mexico, its image abroad, its troubled relationship with the United States, and the pre-Columbian civilizations that thrived in Mesoamerica before the Spanish Conquest. Sunday Afternoon in the Valley of Mexico is a nationalist spectacle staged in a stadium and the pretext for this propagandistic tribute to an emergent Mexican modernity. Natives provides both an investigation and critique of the anti-immigration and "Nativist" movements along the US-Mexico border. Home Movies documents a North American family's travels by rail through Mexico. Magueyes by Ruben Gamez animates that icon of mexicanidad, the agave, by sending the plants off to a civil war. Lerner's newest work, Magnavoz, is an experimental adaptation on Xavier Icaza's speculative rant on the future of post-revolutionary Mexico. Bringing together noisy broadcasts from atop the volcanoes, raucous bacchanalia at popular watering holes and a series of apocalyptic, hypernationalistic pronouncements, the meditation is timely and prescient, though it was written more than eighty years ago. Ruins examines counterfeiting in relation to the appropriation of Mexican culture and how the rarefaction of this process recontextualizes archeological objects as art. At the center of Ruins is Brigido Lara, a master forger whose "Pre-Columbian" objects have been displayed in major (and unwitting) museums throughout the US and Europe.