Xilitla is the name of a 35 mm film that involves locations in the town of Xilitla (La Huasteca), a place located, a seductive and decadent setting for nature's exuberance in Mexican landscape and presented by visual artist Melanie Smith (b. UK 1965, has lived and worked in Mexico City since 1989) in collaboration with Rafael Ortega at the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011. It is a piece that combines the very different media of video and painting, in a combination rare among the artist's works, Smith has performed in it a "dismantling [of] the frame through conceptual plays on repetition and difference, through which her production is displaced from painting toward the potential to 'unframe' the frame." This book records the filmic event, taking the reader on a tour of the fantastical, surrealistic ruins of the "English garden" constructed by the British writer and poet Edward James (1907-1984).