Mariana Páez thought she knew who would watch. When she shared on social media a documentary she had appeared in, she expected family, friends and neighbours to take a look.
Instead, UN News reports, she heard from people she had not spoken to in years. Among them were Karen Ramírez and Abel Bastida, former schoolmates who had taken different career paths but shared a fascination with the place where they grew up.
The three arranged a video call, planned for 20 or 30 minutes. It ran to nearly two hours, ranging across farming, food, traditions, water and the problems they saw around them.
"We couldn't stop talking," Ms Páez recalled, according to UN News.
Farming on the wetlands
That place is Xochimilco, in Mexico City. UN News describes it as one of the last remaining areas of an ancient system of lakes and canals that once characterised the Valley of Mexico.
For centuries, farmers known as chinamperos have cultivated plots called chinampas there. These, the report explains, are fertile plots built on wetlands, which produce food while preserving knowledge handed down through generations.
That living heritage is under pressure. UN News lists urbanisation, environmental degradation, climate change and a shifting relationship between young people and the land.
The documentary, Chinamperos: Preserving Ancestral Farming Practices in Mexico City, was directed by Mexican filmmaker Rodrigo Jardón Galeana and shot in San Gregorio Atlapulco, one of Xochimilco's villages. It grew out of a 2025 report on interconnected risks by the UN University Institute for Environment and Human Security, which concluded that societies must think beyond the short term and weigh the wellbeing of future generations.
The aim, according to UN News, was to take a scientific report off the page and show what it means for the people at the centre of it.
From a conversation to a seminar
That two-hour call led the three to found the Permanent Seminar on Xochimilco Studies, known as SEPEX, to open up dialogue about the territory and its culture. As UN News puts it, a film meant to communicate research had sparked a local conversation nobody had seen coming.
The film went on to be screened at the COP30 climate conference in Brazil and at festivals in Spain, Greece, Türkiye and the Czech Republic. For Ms Páez, though, the most important effects were closer to home.
In her own family, UN News reports, the film brought greater recognition to work and Indigenous knowledge that had not always been valued like other professions.
One of the chinamperos featured, Samuel Avelino, died earlier this year. Ms Páez later discovered that a screenshot of the UN News story carrying his testimony was among the last things he shared on Facebook.
"He felt heard," she said.
That matters, she explained, because the everyday lives of chinamperos rarely reach beyond their own circles. Outsiders rarely ask what a day working the land is like.
Coming home
More than a year on, the film returned to Mexico, in September 2026 according to UN News' Spanish-language report. SEPEX helped organise a visit to Xochimilco for representatives of the UN University and the UN in Mexico, with screenings at the National Centre for the Arts and the Metropolitan Autonomous University.
Residents, researchers, students, UN staff and city officials came together. The aim, UN News says, was not just to show a film but to let the community speak directly to researchers and decision makers.
"Xochimilco is a living territory," said Allegra Baiocchi, the UN Resident Coordinator in Mexico. She described it as a place where biodiversity, water management, climate adaptation, food security and ancestral knowledge all converge.
Shen Xiaomeng, Vice-Rector of the UN University in Europe and Director of the institute behind the report, met chinampero Eric Enríquez and noted the pride with which he spoke about his work. Farmers' survival, she said, depends on how much society values them, but everyone else depends on those who grow our food.
A window, not a solution
Ms Ramírez sees the film not as a solution but as a "window", a way of looking at what may lie ahead before deciding what to do. She wants it screened in more neighbourhoods and public spaces across Xochimilco, with children joining the conversations.
Mr Bastida stresses that Xochimilco is not simply a landscape in need of preservation. People live there, with different needs and different visions of its future.
The documentary does not resolve those differences, UN News concludes. What it has done is create a place where people can meet on common ground and talk about them.
