Cine Bajo el Cielo / Ciclocinema

Cine Bajo el Cielo A.C. is a civil association based in Oaxaca whose itinerant programme, Ciclocinema, takes free stop-motion animation workshops to communities in difficult settings and then premieres the children's films outdoors on electricity the audience generates by pedalling. The generator is a Bike Friday Haul-A-Day bicigenerador, donated by the Open Air Cinema Foundation and descended from the Cinebike build; Bike Friday reported in January 2017 that the team had used Haul-a-Days for over three years to reach more than 50 communities. Tours are documented on Oaxaca's Costa and Istmo, in Coahuila, in Chiapas and across Veracruz between December 2016 and 2021.

Specifications

What do these labels mean?

Field	Value	Confidence	Sources
Generator	1 Bike Friday Haul-A-Day bicigeneradorDonated by the Open Air Cinema Foundation; the same cargo-bike generator design as the Cinebike build.	Documented	¹
Reach (through 2017)	50+ communities	Documented	¹
Distance travelled	7,000 miles (through 2017)	Documented	¹
Field-documented duration	over 3 years, to January 2017	Documented	¹
Workshop model	free itinerant stop-motion animation workshops; the children's films then premiere to the community on the bicycle generatorsOne workshop's span is documented by its poster: Casa de Cultura de Zinacantán, Chiapas, 4–9 June 2018, children aged 7 to 12, 4 to 7 pm.	Documented	³
Workshops running since	2016The first stop-motion workshop tour was announced for Tehuantepec, Huatulco and Pochutla, Oaxaca, December 2016 to February 2017.	Documented	^3,4
Animated shorts produced	10 per the broadcaster's release (communities of Oaxaca and Chiapas)Reported as stated, not reconciled: the release names only Oaxaca and Chiapas although its own first three episodes are Veracruz films, and the channel's 2021 videomemoria speaks of eight shorts from the third (Veracruz) tour alone.	Documented	^3,5
Television series	6 episodes — Ciclocinema, historias de mi comunidad; Mx Nuestro Cine (Canal 22, signal 22.2), 20–28 December 2023	Documented	^2,3
Languages of the films	Nahuatl, Tsotsil, Tseltal, Ch'ol, Spanish	Documented	³
Festival selections	Cumbre Tajín, Ambulante, Animasivo, Festival Regional de Artes Textiles, Latino-docs (France), Gazte Film Fest (Spain)El camino de la serpiente also took the Estímulo Creativo prize at the FAUNA Tepoztlán Animal Festival, per the channel's own notes.	Documented	^3,5
Documented screening tours	Oaxaca Costa and Istmo 2016–2017; Coahuila (Festival de Cultura Julio Torri); Veracruz third tour, 8 venues, 2021	Documented	⁵
Buffer and voltage specifics	not disclosedNot independently republished for this deployment; the design is inherited from the Cinebike lineage (2 × Goal Zero Sherpa 100, Optoma ML750 at 19 V), but this project's own numbers are not separately documented.	Not disclosed	¹

History

The association dates its beginning to a night in 2014, when friends and volunteers went out into a Mexico City street to put on a free public screening ⁵. That same year, with a cargo bike carrying a built-in generator from Open Air Cinema and Bike Friday, it ran a short tour of sustainably powered screenings on the Oaxaca coast ⁵.

Ciclocinema's pedal-powered strand is documented from December 2016, when the association announced its first stop-motion workshop for children, built from reused materials, in Tehuantepec, Huatulco and Pochutla ⁴; the association's own reel records the open-air screenings of that 2016–2017 tour ⁵. Children's films from that tour came from San Pedro Pochutla, Puerto Ángel, Santa María Huatulco, Guelaguichi and Barra de Copalita, with support from FONCA, Animables, Open Air Cinema, Ecco AC and Magnolia Estudio ⁵. Bike Friday's January 2017 report placed the team's activity across Oaxaca, Chiapas and Veracruz ¹. A tour of open-air screenings ran in Coahuila within the Festival de Cultura "Julio Torri" ⁵, and a six-day workshop is documented at the Casa de Cultura de Zinacantán, Chiapas, in June 2018 ⁴. That second Ciclocinema tour, in Chiapas, produced the films from Zinacantán, Comitán, Palenque, Tenejapa and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas later broadcast on television ⁵. In late 2020 the team published Recetario para animar, six video lessons in animation using materials found at home, supported by the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes ⁵. The third Ciclocinema tour, in 2021, worked through eight venues in Veracruz, among them the Centro de Documentación del Son Jarocho in Jáltipan; the association's videomemoria of that tour credits Open Air Cinema among its supporters ⁵. In May 2023 the founder was profiled in an English-language video segment ⁶, and on 18 December 2023 Canal 22's Mx Nuestro Cine announced the six-episode series Ciclocinema, historias de mi comunidad, broadcast on signal 22.2 from 20 December ^2,3.

Night screening on a cathedral plaza: a bicycle generator on its stand beside a tripod-mounted screen showing fireworks, the lit cathedral behind — Photo: Cine Bajo el Cielo (facebook.com/Cinebajoelcielo) — via facebook.com

People and community

The founder, Claudia G. Covarrubias, co-directs the films with the children and is the subject of the 2023 video profile ^5,6. Bike Friday's 2017 report introduced her as a filmmaker, producer and educator and the President of Cine Bajo el Cielo, heading a team of animators, cultural promoters and volunteers ¹.

The same report named the Ciclocinema team: Carolina Gomez, Vladimir C Roshdestvensky, David Lavin, Carolina Flor, Juan Camilo Escobar, Irene Heras, Laura Suarez and Diego Suarez, working in collaboration with the animation studio Animatitlán ¹. Carolina Gómez García is listed as the person responsible for Ciclocinema, based in Ciudad Mendoza, Veracruz, in a 2017 Universidad Veracruzana directory of cultural managers ⁷; the Veracruz films credit their direction to collective creation with Claudia G. Covarrubias and Cabrolina Gómez ⁵.

Volunteers do the work alongside the children. In Guelaguichi, Oaxaca, volunteers helped the workshop's 20 children record all the narration for their film ¹, Rescate en la playa, about a whale stranded on a Mexican beach ⁵. The films are the children's collective creations about their own places — a serpent that opens the paths of La Cuesta, the healer of Tlaquilpa, the reddened Moon over Zinacantán, the founding struggle of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas ³.

The association's film work also reaches beyond the bicycle. In December 2017 it led #RelatosVioleta with Mujeres Lab and Infancia Común: five short films, released on its YouTube channel, on preventing violence and human trafficking from a human-rights and gender perspective, directed by Alicia Ortega, Gabriela Martínez, Claudia G. Covarrubias, Paulina Romo, Anaeli Ibarra and Alejandrina Romero ⁸.

A rider pedals the bicycle generator, its wheel lit green, beside the screen showing one of the children's animated films — Photo: Cine Bajo el Cielo (facebook.com/Cinebajoelcielo) — via facebook.com

Watch

Reports (1)

Report · Published 8 May 2023 · 8 min

An eight-minute English-language segment on the project: the founder travels to remote parts of Mexico to make short films with children, with the screenings often powered by community members taking turns on a bicycle, and examples of the children's work are shown.

Video: Ignite Story Lab, The Lightning Zone (YouTube) — Watch on YouTube⁶ Loads from youtube-nocookie.com only when you press play; nothing is requested from YouTube before that.

Films by the children (5)

Short film · Published 8 December 2017 · 4 min

Creado por niños y niñas de San Pedro Pochutla, Oaxaca. Este cortometraje forma parte de las creaciones hechas por niños y niñas del proyecto de CICLOCINEMA 2017.

TranslationMade by girls and boys of San Pedro Pochutla, Oaxaca. This short is one of the works the children created in the 2017 Ciclocinema project.