The Film
The Big New-Mex Review is a feature-length documentary set in New Mexico, exploring how music carries culture, memory, and identity across generations.
Following founder Lance Bendiksen, the film moves through towns, villages, and rural landscapes, encountering Indigenous, Hispanic, and Anglo musicians whose work reflects lived experience, lineage, and ongoing cultural evolution.
Through these encounters, a broader portrait emerges—one of connection and continuity, where music becomes a shared language across difference.
Guided by narrator Wes Studi, the film brings together performance, observation, and personal story in a way that allows music and place to exist as one continuous experience.
Rooted in New Mexico, the film uses this cultural convergence as a lens to reflect on identity, understanding, and coexistence in a divided world.
The Stories
The Big New-Mex Review is built from intimate encounters with musicians, historians, and cultural voices across New Mexico whose lives are shaped by music, memory, and place.
Among them is Nasario García, a 90-year-old author and historian preserving a living link to New Mexico’s oral traditions and musical past, alongside contemporary musicians navigating heritage, hardship, and creative renewal.
These stories unfold within the landscapes that hold them—adobe cityscapes, high desert roads, mountain towns, and time-worn entryways shaped by generations of passage. An old New Mexican gate appears as a quiet threshold between past and present.
Members of the bands Euforia and Nosotros appear in performance and reflection, offering perspective on how tradition and contemporary identity continue to shape their evolving sound.
In Nambe Pueblo and surrounding communities, musicians speak to the deep relationship between land and expression, where music is present in daily life as much as it is on stage.
Taken together, these voices reveal music as a lived force—woven into continuity, survival, reflection, and connection.
