Institute History
Description
The Trip is a story about Katya, a 19 year old girl who has grown up side by side with Mexico City, who has seen its anarchic growth and its crisis. She is not only a witness to the deterioration of the largest city in the world -"a city that smells like shit", says Katya-but also to the political, economical and environmental crisis of her country. But above all (and this is perhaps what has affected her most) she has witnessed the moral crisis of the previous generation, the one to which her parents belong.
Juan and Elsa, 1968 activists, feminists, radicals, liberals, in port hippies, advocates of progress, and so on, have educated their daughter Katya in an atmosphere made up of much fantasizing, generosity, dogmatism, and of a great lack of common sense.
In the 90' s, Juan is an important Government Official who doesn't want to know anything about his leftist past.
Elsa is a woman who, contrary to her husband, prefers to cling to the past and doesn't want to face the defeat of her ideas in the present.
Katya is conscious of the crisis that her mother and father are going through, and suffers, though she doesn't understand the nature of the problem. She also suffers as a result of the sick relationship carried on by her parents.
Katya is precociously disenchanted. Before starting out in life she has already lost her illusions. She is a young girl grown old whose only escape consists of visiting her buddies Diego and Tania to talk about their fantasies. One of these fantasies begins to fill their hours of leisure: A trip. A trip as an escape. a trip as a cure for the soul, a trip as an antidote against reality. Katya is the first of the three who manages to escape. She finds the means to do it, and chooses the ideal city for dreaming: New York.
But the reality that Katya discovers in New York is a tough one. She finds a Third World within the First World. Solitude, fear, and the hard facts of life are sad realities that Katya experiences in the city of her dreams.
In quite unusual circumstances, Katya gets to know a young Greek stevedore who for certain reasons has been forced to leave his country. Badly in need to talk with someone. the stevedore seeks out Katya's company. Katya, having looked within the depths of solitude. sees her parents· tragedy in a truer light as well as the myths that surrounded her own.
In Mexico. her reality, her friends and her parents await her. But above all what awaits her is maturity.