Human Resources-Los Angeles presents Mascota an experimental film by Nico Garcini and Misael José Oquendo.

Saturday, February 19th 

Doors: 7pm 

Film to begin promptly at 7:30pm 

Vaccination card is required for entry and attendants are required to wear a mask at all times inside the gallery.

Please note this film screening has limited capacity. Be sure to arrive early to ensure entry. Please RSVP here. 

The story of MASCOTA follows a lost pilgrim (PEREGRINA) who finds themselves furloughed in a town full of live action role players. In need of a square meal, the Pilgrim meets and follows a vagrant LARPer, RATBOY, who is fervently obsessed with an entity called the Floon. The townsfolk are not only all participating in a town wide LARP campaign, but they all appear to be compulsively partaking in a town lottery. The pilgrim comes to find that each individual’s lottery ticket is what allows them to participate in the town’s activities. Without a ticket, one is ostracized from all establishments and events, and like Ratboy, becomes a Mascota, and townsfolk then consider them to be a subaltern citizen. Mascotas present as half human/half animal figures, as they have chosen a path whereby they no longer see the difference between their in-game role-play and their out-of-game persona. These mascotas all live together in a ‘monster camp,’ a harmonious socialist community just outside of town. Here they worship the ways of the Floon, a deity whose name has its origin in a LARP term that signifies the feeling of exaltation one gets from participating in a campaign. Our protagonist, after becoming familiar with this shunned community, begins to notice certain inherent disparities between these two societies. Noticing a sense of superiority among the townsfolk, the Pilgrim becomes increasingly worried that the ticket holders and the ticketless will inevitably be brought to conflict.

MASCOTA is an animated experimental fantasy film created through the use of keyframing, image plating and motion capture A.I. software. MASCOTA’s story and aesthetic draws from a myriad of sources: Live Action Role Playing, an interactive role-playing game wherein the participants portray characters through physical action and fashion. This heavily inspired the premise of the film wherein every character in the film aside from the protagonist is a ‘LARPer’ engaged in a fantasy campaign. Through the use of animation, the film is free to explore and engage anachronistically with any setting, mythology, fashion and style. The dialogue of the feature merges LARPing terminology and antiquated speech as a diachronic experiment in
form. Concerning the etymology of MASCOTA, look to the 19th century French, mascotte, meaning a pet or lucky charm, a concept by which the feature’s auteurs gather certain thematic symbols. The film’s satirical and abstracted reenactment of the christ myth is told through the haze of unrequited love and its heavily tragic consequences.

Nico Garcini  is a Cuban writer, filmmaker, musician and visual artist currently based in Tucson, AZ. He graduated with a BFA in film from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he studied under Peter Hutton.

Misael José Oquendo is a Puerto Rican video artist, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. He recently graduated from the Aesthetics & Politics (2020, MA) program at the California Institute of the Arts. He also studied film and visual critical studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he graduated with a BFA in 2016. His videos have been exhibited at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and most recently at the LA Contemporary Archive in Los Angeles.