NATALIA ALMADA: Chris Marker at the beginning of "Sans Soleil" says,
"I do not know how those who do not film remember."
As a filmmaker, like, the act of filming is kind of
an act of creating memory for yourself.
I was doing my Master's in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design,
and I took an elective in video,
and I just kind of got hooked, and I ended up doing–
my Master's thesis was a short film.
It's called "All Water Has a Perfect Memory,"
and it's a film that looks at the death of my sister
through audio recordings of my American mother and my Mexican father remembering how she
drowned...
and what I kind of tried to do was create a visual memory of my own because
I'm the only one in my family who wasn't around.
I was too little to remember,
so I knew that if I interviewed my family
that they would answer my questions, as opposed to giving me their memories,
and so I got each of them a decent audio recorder and said, "Just send me a recording."
[MAN] One is left with the pain,
with good memories,
and with something indescribable.
That feeling of impotence.
[WOMAN] And I've thought so many times that, uh, throughout–
since the beginning of time, a mother's wail of--
of agony of losing one of her children,
losing a child has probably always sounded the same,
the same as mine, always.
[Natalia Almada] I was born in Mexico, but my, uh, parents divorced when I was very young,
and then my mother moved back to the States,
so I grew up, really, half and half.
I feel more rooted in Mexico because my father kind of stayed put in one place
and had a much closer tie to the land.
He was a cattle rancher, and so my summers were spent on a cattle ranch in Sinaloa,
and there was just more family history, was closer to my grandmother.
Somebody gave me these audio recordings on cassette tape that my grandmother had made
in the Seventies.
My great-grandfather was one of Mexico's most polemical historical figures
because he closed a church,
and he was considered a dictator.
Ultimately, it--it's a film about my experience of this history and
how it kind of–
how I inherit it and how we create memory and history,
so it's very much a personal film.
Like, I had this thread, like, this historical thread in my grandmother's voice
that I wanted to kind of keep as a bed but to play with Mexico City.
How can I tie these things together?
And the film, really, it was
a game, you know,
a game of how do I--
how do I play with this present in the context of the past?
I think making the film was kind of my reconnection to Mexico City as an adult.
— Hola.
[chuckles]
In the last– maybe it's 8 years or so since Calderon declared war on the cartels.
Uh, we have an increase in violence in Mexico.
When I set out to make "El Velador,"
I shot it in a cemetery in Culiacan, Sinaloa, which is where my family's from.
It's like a little city.
The kind of growth and opulence of the mausoleums was a mirror of what's happening.
I would go doing sound and camera, and I went with Ramiro,
who was a cowboy who had worked with my dad on the ranch,
so he basically was kind of my bodyguard because it was quite a dangerous place to be.
Whenever violence is happening,
I think that one of the first things that happens is that there's silence.
I couldn't ask, like, "Who is buried here, and why did they get killed?"
Those questions would have put me in danger and the person I was asking in danger,
so why not try to understand the situation in its silence?
I've edited all my own films, and I love the process.
There's a really nice balance, also, in terms of being out in the world
and kind of exposed and vulnerable to the elements
and the outside and then kind of coming into your nice, reflective space.
I don't think it's such a huge leap from the documentary
to fiction, at least not the kinds of documentaries I've made
and the fiction I'm– I'm making.
It's called "Todo Lo Demas," "Everything Else."
It's about the violence of bureaucracy,
and it comes out of Hannah Arendt's idea that–
that bureaucracies are a form of violence because they dehumanize the individual.
I was swimming at a pool that belonged to the government of taxation...
—See? That's me in the– taking my pictures in my bathing suit.
[laughs]
That's how you get access.
And the women who would be at the pool when I would go swimming were retired bureaucrats
in their,
you know, 50s, 60s, 70s, and at the pool,
they were so open and kind of naked and fleshy,
and they would be chatting and putting creams on each other, and I thought, "Well, this
is so different.
"Like, this is so real, you know, compared to the woman
that I have encountered at some office
who I probably didn't even really see or really didn't even think of as a person,"
and the idea to kind of write a story about one of these women and her internal life,
that was kind of the impetus to make the film.
Often, the photographs would lead to the writing,
so I would go out with my camera and kind of see something,
photograph something,
and then come home and insert my character into that moment or that place or that feeling
that–
that I had photographed.
She decides to learn to swim, but she's afraid of the water, and, in my
mind,
you know, she knew how to swim,
and she's someone who became afraid,
and it's very much what happened to my–
my mom, that my mother knew how to swim,
and some years ago, she developed a fear of the water that was very much related to my
sister but kind of abstract,
and so I was wondering,
you know, what makes a kind of wound like that open up again and manifest itself in
that way,
and so my character is a kind of mix of my mother
in that sense that she has this personal experience and inner life
that very much is like my mom's in many ways, um,
but she's set in this Mexico City context of being a bureaucrat,
and, you know, it's a challenge for me right now to see, well,
how am I gonna negotiate the kind of personal inner life of this woman with these ideas
of power and class and how society works,
uh, into one film that kind of works as a film.
I think when you're making films that are very minimalist in some ways but it's, um,
the stillness of the camera or the kind of formality of the frame...
The sound becomes very important to give it a fullness and life.
In a lot of ways, I think,
Alejandro has been my most consistent and valuable and closest collaborator.
This is our third film together.
At one point, I thought, "I'm tired of saying I'm half Mexican, half American.
"Why am I not 100% Mexican and 100% American?
Like, why can't I fully be both things?"
I think in terms of my work and as being a filmmaker, an artist,
um, I think I connect more to my Mexican side in terms of what I want to speak about.
You know, there are things that definitely come out of being American,
a kind of independence as a woman, for example.
Like, maybe part of what allows me to go out and make the films I make and feel that I
have the entitlement to do that maybe has to do with, you know,
going to an all-girls Catholic school in Chicago,
so I think that when I embrace that duality and I understand that it shapes
the way I see things
and it gives me something special in terms of how I look at the world and how I relate
to people.
And if I can embrace that about myself and kind of allow that to be part of my work,
it's a very rich space in which to work.
[strumming music]
[violin muisc]
[soft electronic music]