
No Power, No Technology, No Modern Life: The Mennonites of Mexico
A Mennonite community in Mexico lives without electricity, cars, or modern machinery, farming the land much as their ancestors did centuries ago. The film traces the group's origins in Reformation-era Europe, the persecution that pushed them from Switzerland and the Netherlands through Prussia and Russia, and the migrations that eventually brought them to Chihuahua's plains. Interviews with community elders and church leaders explain the religious convictions behind their rejection of modern technology and their insistence on German-language schooling and horse-drawn labor. The camera follows daily routines inside the settlement: baking bread, tending livestock, worship services, and the strict separation the colony maintains from surrounding Mexican society. The film also touches on tensions within the community, including younger members who question the old rules and the pressures of land scarcity that keep pushing new Mennonite colonies further south. It is a portrait of a closed religious world still functioning on its own terms in the twenty-first century, told largely through the words of the people living it.