What were the starting points and initial ideas behind soy mi madre?
I’d always wanted to make a telenovela and began in Mexico City working with a group of actors and crew to make a half-hour film which would condense many of the elements of televised melodrama, the artifice, the overblown theatricality, and a frontal acting style but stylize it in terms of its look and feel. It was made as a commission for Aspen, where the immigrant populations and the working classes are almost exclusively Latino and the social field remains resolutely fixed.). I adamantly didn’t want to make a satire or a pastiche of soap – with wobbly sets and bad camera work. In fact, I wanted to make something exquisite, purposefully cinematic, shot on 16mm, with beautifully dressed sets and, of course, hair and make-up please.
Could you maybe share an important/funny/moving/surprising anecdote related to the making-of the film?
The fact that it was even made? This film was shot over two long days and nights, and written, cast, produced and edited in eight weeks, and before I arrived in Mexico City on a rainy night in June I didn’t know a soul. I found an assistant and we got to work. Obviously, it was incredibly difficult but it also gave us great ambition and daring in terms of knocking on doors and making phone calls. The female characters are played by Patricia Reyes Spindola, Gina Morett, Veronica Langer and Zaide Silvia Guitterez, some of Mexico’s best-known actors all of whom regularly play in telenovelas, with a subtle range of styles, which hints at the artificiality of the form, how values like gender and class are constructed in soap, but also how actors within the form are eminently replaceable.
What would you like to say to your audience before seeing soy mi madre?
Enjoy the ride. What else?
What are you currently working on?
I’m co-curating a project with Sinisa Mitrovic for the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin - Auto-Kino! - an indoor stationary drive-in cinema which will show a rotating mix of artists videos, experimental films and Ufa melodramas, West German Krimis and DEFA rubble films.