Bruce “Pacho” Lane has made 20 award-winning documentary films in Mexico, the US, and Afghanistan, which have shown on PBS and the Discovery Channel in the US, as well as on German, British, French, Japanese and a dozen other TV networks. His films have screened at the Smithsonian, the Musee de l’Homme, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, among others, and have received major awards including 3 CINE Golden Eagles; Best Film awards at Festival de Cine Indígena (Mexico), IV Muestra Internacional de Cine (Mexico), the International Festival on Culture & Psychiatry, The American Film Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Latino Film Festival, and Festival Contra el Silencio (Mexico), as well as other awards at the Latin American Studies Association; Anthropology Film Festival, London Film Festival; Filmex; Margaret Mead Festival, Cinéma du Reel (Paris), and Edinburgh Film Festival

Lane has served as a cinematographer on a dozen films, including “Burden of Dreams”, on the making of Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo”, “Routes of Rhythm”, on Afro-Cuban music, and “Chulas Fronteras”,” on Tex-Mex music. Lane has taught documentary film production at the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas, the Rochester Institute of Technology, and chaired the Departamento de Cine at the Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Morelos, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Lane’s Mexico films focus on the struggle for identity of the indigenous Totonac and Nahua cultures of Mexico. His three Totonac films taken together give the viewer an understanding of this struggle in an isolated, traditional community:

Combining ritual, dance, music, poetry, and art, The Tree Of Life (29 min) is a meditation on the mystery at the heart of human life. It recounts the ritual of “Los Voladores” (the flyers) a 2000-year old Totonac Indian ritual that calls us to keep the world in balance with our lives. The Tree Of Knowledge (25 min) contrasts two systems of education. The public school system uses patriotic symbols to "integrate" Indian pupils into the national culture while teaching them to reject their own identity. In contrast, the “Danza de los Huehues” urges young Totonacs to learn from the school, yet warns them not to abandon their own culture. Democracia Indîgena (37 min) examines the rights revolution of Indian Mexico and the liberating role of “Indian Theology”. “We have been to school, we have learned Spanish. Now you must stop treating us like animals. Our gods were here first, and we are proud to be Indians.”

In The Eagle’s Children (39’) , Lane looks at how the Danza Azteca, a religious ritual which survived the Spanish Conquest, is helping Chicanos rediscover their Indian roots, their identity, and their pride in their heritage.

Lane’s two films on the Nahua community of Tepoztlan,Morelos, A Defender of His People (56’) & The Language of the Seeds (20’), show the reaction of a community on the edge of Mexico City to the pressures of globalization:

The Indian village of Tepoztlan, just south of Mexico City, is a major tourist destination, the New Age capital of Mexico, a popular stopover on the backpacker trail, and a site for second homes of wealthy Mexico City residents.

In 1995, a multinational corporation announced a huge development, with a golf course, 700 luxury homes, an industrial park, and a shopping center. Rather than face this threat to their identity, the tepoztecos barricaded the town and fought the project to a standstill. At the forefront of this “Golf Club War” was to the god/hero El Tepozteco. As one of the locals, or "tepoztecos", put it, "When we are in trouble, we call on El Tepozteco, because he is our warrior spirit. But when it is time to go to heaven, we turn to the Almighty." Many say El Tepozteco personally led the defense of the barricades, even driving away a federal SWAT team. Certainly his spirit, and his legend, served as a rallying cry for his people and helped them successfully defy the combined might of a multinational corporation and the Mexican state.

In A Journey to the Butterflies (27’), Lane shows the beauty and fragility of the Monarch butterfly sanctuaries of Mexico, whose existence is threatened by the unconcern of the “ecotourists” who come to see the butterflies but pay no attention to the poverty of the Nahua Indians on whom the butterflies depend for their survival.