Meet the young female direc­tors lead­ing Mexico’s cin­e­ma revolution

Tra­di­tion­al­ly a show­case for East­ern Euro­pean con­tem­po­rary and clas­sic cin­e­ma, the 51^st edi­tion of the Karlovy Vary Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val broad­ened its scope by cham­pi­oning nine films from Mex­i­co made by young female direc­tors. Among them, two doc­u­men­taries stood out, Tatiana Huezo’s Tem­pes­tad, and Bet­z­abé García’s Kings of Nowhere, both cre­ative, exper­i­men­tal pieces of cin­e­mat­ic non-fic­tion, bold in mes­sage and delivery.

These films have dif­fer­ent sub­ject mat­ter, but share a sen­si­tiv­i­ty towards their sub­jects. Both find unique ways to express the expe­ri­ences of their char­ac­ters, whether they’ve been mar­gin­alised, exploit­ed or worse. Which is unsur­pris­ing, giv­en that they were made by young female artists from a coun­try where 45 per cent of all women are sub­ject to vio­lence of some form or anoth­er (six die every day). Such bleak con­di­tions solic­its all kind of respons­es, many of which are silenced. In Mex­i­co, cin­e­ma has pro­vid­ed a voice for the vic­tims of abuse.

The Mex­i­can film indus­try has grown con­sid­er­ably in recent years, achiev­ing a num­ber of atten­dance and pro­duc­tion records last year. Hue­zo has seen the change in her life­time. When she began study­ing film­mak­ing 10 years ago, ​“only eight films per year were being made [in Mex­i­co.]” ​“Last year the num­ber was 141.” For her and her con­tem­po­raries, ​“the world has turned towards Mex­i­co,” and though in the main­stream this atten­tion is large­ly reserved for big-bud­get fic­tion from the likes of Ale­jan­dro González Iñár­ritu, Alfon­so Cuarón and Guiller­mo del Toro, in the more insu­lar world of inter­na­tion­al fes­ti­vals, the pic­ture is dif­fer­ent. All eyes are on doc­u­men­tary, and most of the nation’s pre-emi­nent new doc­u­men­tar­i­ans are female. As Gar­cía states, ​“70 per cent of doc­u­men­taries pro­duced in Mex­i­co last year were made by female directors.”

García’s film, the atmos­pher­ic, enig­mat­ic Kings of Nowhere, shows San Mar­cos, a Mex­i­can town that, after the con­struc­tion of a near­by dam, has found itself entire­ly sub­merged under water. Hav­ing known the town when it had a pop­u­la­tion of three hun­dred, Gar­cía joins the remain­ing three fam­i­lies that occu­py this strange, often beau­ti­ful, near-emp­ty oth­er­world, film­ing them over five years and liv­ing with the par­tic­i­pants for long stretch­es at a time.

The place was for her ​“a stroke of mag­i­cal real­ism,” an ethe­re­al space where com­mu­nal life con­tin­ues despite an absent com­mu­ni­ty. ​“How can there still be a work­ing tor­tilla shop in the mid­dle of all this water?” Start­ing from this cen­tral ques­tion, Gar­cía cap­tures the strange­ness of the sit­u­a­tion (the fac­to­ry churn­ing out tor­tillas for an emp­ty town, the cow strand­ed on a small island, or the troupe of chil­dren that per­form for nobody in par­tic­u­lar) as much as the men­ace. ​“I always saw the pres­ence of vio­lence, armed bus­es and vans or shots in the night, in the dis­tance” and in the film, the threat of remote, vio­lent forces is often heard or spo­ken of, if nev­er seen.

Why these three fam­i­lies stay is nev­er quite clear, but the warmth, resilience and human­i­ty Gar­cía finds in them is a tes­ta­ment to her per­se­ver­ant, care­ful doc­u­men­ta­tion of this mys­tic place. Despite the dis­tanc­ing effect of its for­mal con­ceits, the long takes, dis­tant, unob­tru­sive obser­va­tion, and over­all some­what glacial plac­ing, Kings of Nowhere is a pro­found­ly warm film, due per­haps to the director’s close involve­ment with the sub­ject. Her sub­jects laugh and look at the cam­era, and main­tain a laud­able spir­it despite their adver­si­ty. ​“Life doesn’t have a han­dle, there’s noth­ing to hold onto, we’re just float­ing through the uni­verse,” pro­claims one of the vil­lagers. Hors­es gnaw at grass, kids bang on drums, tor­tillas are cooked, and life car­ries on, even though no one seems to be pay­ing attention.

Huezo’s Tem­pes­tad paints a sim­i­lar­ly poet­ic pic­ture of the cit­i­zens of Mexico’s resilience against the many griev­ances of the state. ​“Born out of poems writ­ten on scraps of paper,” Huezo’s film fol­lows the plight of two women who fall vic­tim to human traf­fick­ing. The first, a cus­toms offi­cer, faces a tor­tur­ous peri­od of false impris­on­ment, pass­ing hands between the police and car­tels in a lengthy, har­row­ing night­mare; and the sec­ond, a cir­cus clown in an iso­lat­ed com­mu­ni­ty, endures an end­less search for her abduct­ed daughter.

“It was a sto­ry which I couldn’t turn my back on,” Hue­zo insists, adding that the first woman was her friend before becom­ing a col­lab­o­ra­tor. Switch­ing mid­way between the per­spec­tive of the two women, Tem­pes­tad draws visu­al lines across Mexico’s geog­ra­phy and between its state and cit­i­zens. Match­ing the women’s affect­ing tes­ti­mo­ny with a series of well sequenced, beau­ti­ful­ly pho­tographed obser­va­tion­al mate­r­i­al, Hue­zo says that the film came from a desire to ​“trav­el as she did,” to take the view­er along her friend’s cross-coun­try jour­ney home from prison.

Across these images, city scenes with a vis­i­bly oppres­sive police pres­ence or dilap­i­dat­ed, desert­ed rur­al land­scapes, there is one point of con­sis­ten­cy. Imbu­ing the film with blue and grey hues that, ​“rep­re­sent per­fect­ly the emo­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion that is hap­pen­ing to the two char­ac­ters in the film,” the pres­ence of con­stant rain and storm clouds looms over each scene as well as over the peo­ple. Asyn­chro­nous to the visu­als, the aur­al tes­ti­mo­ny is that of two women who are tied by the expe­ri­ence of inex­plic­a­ble suf­fer­ing. What Huezo’s visu­als make clear, with the con­tin­u­al focus on the for­lorn faces of the many women trav­el­ling along with her, is that the expe­ri­ence of these two must not be under­stood as iso­lat­ed tes­ti­mo­ny, but as gen­er­alised nar­ra­tives rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the expe­ri­ences of a great many more women across Mexico.

When think­ing about why young Mex­i­can women are mak­ing so many great doc­u­men­taries, Hue­zo explained that effec­tive doc­u­men­tary film­mak­ing lets view­ers ​“see the real­i­ty in which they are immersed.” Both her film and García’s find remark­able ways to por­tray deeply sen­si­tive sit­u­a­tions, sub­tly excis­ing the trau­mas their char­ac­ters expe­ri­ence with­out impos­ing it polem­i­cal­ly. ​“If you are able to iden­ti­fy with the char­ac­ters, doc­u­men­tary has the pow­er to involve you with their expe­ri­ence.” Both Tem­pes­tad and Kings of Nowhere do pre­cise­ly this, man­ag­ing to make stylised, for­mal­ly expres­sive films with­out sac­ri­fic­ing any of the empa­thy that their subject’s demand.