In 1997, I returned from Cambridge, in England. It was time to choose a career, and I wanted to leave and study filmmaking. My father had a different idea. First, he told me, study here. Then you can go and study film.

On top of that, circumstances in general eventually led me to decide to stay in my hometown.

That same year, Mexican filmmaker Juan Antonio de la Riva was going to give a workshop at Universidad Iberoamericana. I signed up.

For the first time, he would be the closest I had ever been to someone truly inside that world I felt I belonged to.

For a few days, filmmaking stopped being something that happened somewhere else.

Until then, I wanted to make films, I watched films, I imagined what it would be like to make them. Juan Antonio could talk not only about films, but about what happened when you actually tried to make one.

Eventually, during the workshop, we went out into the street and tried to shoot a scene.

Sometimes you come back with something very close to what you had imagined.

I listened closely to what Juan Antonio said during those days. Something stayed with me from then on: you can imagine an entire film. You can plan it, frame it, rehearse it and try to control every part of it. And then you go out to shoot it, and reality has other plans.

And that, too, is filmmaking.

Looking at these negatives years later, though, I realize that the fictional scene we were trying to shoot may be the least interesting thing in these photographs.

There was another film happening around us.

A group of young students trying to make images in a city where filmmaking was practically nonexistent, guided for a few days by someone who actually knew what it meant to make a movie.

And without realizing it, I photographed that film too.

But the photographs caught something else.

I started trying to make films at a rather peculiar moment. I wasn’t early enough to belong to the generations that spent their entire careers working with film, but I wasn’t late enough to arrive in a world where digital had already changed everything.

I caught the hinge.

A huge video camera. Cables. Tripods. Reflectors. A CRT television sitting in the middle of the street because, if you wanted to see what the camera was seeing, some poor bastard had to carry Grandma’s kitchen television out there.

There was something tremendously physical about all of it. Making an image meant carrying a surprising amount of stuff from one place to another.

Today I can pull out a phone capable of recording an image that, back then, we would hardly have imagined coming from something so small.

Sometimes I wonder what we would have done if someone had put the tools we have today in our hands.

But maybe that question doesn’t matter all that much.

They didn’t exist.

We had what there was.

And we made things.

Maybe that was one of the most useful lessons I learned during those years. You don’t wait for the perfect camera, the perfect circumstances, the perfect city or the perfect moment. You look at what you have in front of you and find a way to make something with it.

But among these negatives, there are two photographs of two boys who made a living working as clowns at an intersection.

We had arrived there carrying a camera, equipment and a fictional story we wanted to tell about what we imagined life in that ecosystem was like. For a few hours, that intersection became our set.

For them, it wasn’t a set.

It was their life.

Us and them: two realities occupying the same piece of street.

We had arrived trying to tell a story about a world they already knew.

And years later, I find myself wondering: who were they? Where did they go after we packed everything up? What became of them?

I don’t know.

The camera kept them for a fraction of a second.

That is all I have.

How honest does fiction have to be with the reality it borrows from?

Not how faithfully it has to reproduce it. Fiction does not owe reality a copy. It can distort it or reinvent it. It can even lie about it.

But we borrow all the time. Then we put the camera away and leave.

Sometimes, the film you think you are making is not the only film happening in front of you, and life has shown me that more than once.

Mino Rimada