An Interview With Natalia Almada
For over two decades, Natalia Almada has combined artistic expression with social inquiry to make films that are both personal reflections and critical social commentaries, focusing on topics ranging from contemporary Mexico to our relationship with technology. Her work straddles the boundaries of documentary, fiction, and experimental film. Along the way, the Mexican American filmmaker has garnered accolades such as Sundance’s Documentary Directing Award (twice), a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and an Ariel Award nomination. Her films have screened at A-list festivals such as Sundance, NYFF, Tribeca, and Cannes Directors’ Fortnight. On the occasion of the theatrical release of her latest feature Users (2021), New York’s BAM Film is presenting a complete retrospective of Almada’s work, running June 9–15, 2023. Users is currently playing theatrically in NY and LA, before expanding to select other theaters.
When Almada was a young girl living with her mom in Chicago, she asked for a camera. Her mom gifted her a 35mm camera, and afterward, she walked around the city taking pictures. This first camera eventually led to an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her first film, the short documentary All Water Has a Perfect Memory (2001). The short film is an audiovisual exploration of Almada’s bicultural family’s painful memories 20-plus years after the tragic death of her older sister.
After making the film, which is based on her family’s audio recordings, Almada’s father gave her audio tapes that her grandmother had recorded decades earlier with the intention of writing a book about her father, the polemic former president of Mexico Plutarco Elias Calles. These audio tapes became the impetus for El General (2009), within which Almada juxtaposes archives of her great-grandfather’s complex legacy, her grandmother’s memories, and her own curious and insightful 16mm observations of Mexico City after the 2006 elections, accompanied by her poetic narration.
Almada’s filmmaking is also significant for its portrayal of her multilayered home state, Sinaloa. In her breakout documentary feature Al Otro Lado (2005), the troubador-like corrido songs narrate the story of both traffickers and migrants. Famous corrido musicians (Los Tigres del Norte, Jenni Rivera, and Jessie Morales) provide a backdrop for Magdiel, a young fisherman and struggling aspiring musician. Magdiel’s circumstances center on the experience of living in an extremely unequal country that forces him to choose between becoming a drug dealer or crossing the border to the U.S. to pursue a better life.
El Velador (2011) portrays the invisible but latent violence in an always-growing cemetery, where a man named Martin guards the extravagant mausoleums of young men who are casualties of Mexico's drug trade. Almada’s first (and currently, only) fiction film Everything Else (2016), is a portrait of a Mexico City government bureaucrat (played by Adriana Barraza). Directing fiction gave Almada the experience of working in a more controlled and higher-scale film production, which she brings to her most recent film Users (2021), a meditative and sharp analysis of our relationship with technology through motherhood.
On the eve of her film retrospective at BAM Film, Documentary had a conversation with Almada to talk about the connections between her films, her approach to memories and context, and questioning the ethics of documentary filmmaking.
This interview has been translated from Spanish and edited for length and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: Seeing your films together in a retrospective, we are able to zoom out and see the connections between them. El General, released in 2009, explored the past; El Velador, released in 2011, explored the present (a consequence of some of the themes explored in El General); and with Users, you explore the future of memory. What do you see when you consider your career as a filmmaker as a whole?
NATALIA ALMADA: On one hand, I think it is an impossible question to answer because I see things that you do not see. Sometimes when I look back, the films mark different stages of my life. The span of years in which I was making them is encapsulated in the films. For example, El Velador takes me back to everything I lived while making it between 2009 and 2011. Maybe other people map out their lives differently, but for me, each film marks a chapter of my life.
What interests me is how memories are related to time. When we look back, when we look at the future, from which point of view are we looking? There is a phrase from Virginia Woolf that I have been thinking about a lot lately: “I now, I then.” It’s the idea that you are always looking at the past from where you are standing in the present—so the past is always changing. And when That idea is very interesting to me because the past is no longer something that can be fixed. Many times “documentary” wants to “fix” things: to say this happened like this, here are the witnesses and documents to prove it. But I like the more unstable idea: that we can only see the past through the lens of where we are now. I do feel that this idea about time, more than just memory, is in all my films. Then I wonder if that’s just the definition of cinema—cinema is time, and it is always related to time.
D: In reference to the idea of the camera as a medium of access and the conversation with your grandmother and El General, can you explain how you were able to access the cassettes containing your grandmother’s memories?
NA: After I made All Water Has Perfect Memory with audio recordings from my parents and brother. I knew I wanted to make a film after my father gave me six audio cassettes that my grandmother had recorded decades earlier. Nobody had listened to them because it was painful to hear her voice. My grandmother died when I was 12 or 13 years old, so for me, there was enough distance from her—something that maybe my father or aunts did not have—to be able to interact with those cassettes. Initially, I thought it was going to be a purely historical film, but the more I listened to her the more they existed for me in the present. I was in a MacDowell Fellowship, and I remember sitting at night by the fire with a glass of wine listening to my grandmother. It was like she was there with me.
The 2006 presidential elections in Mexico were taking place, and I looked at everything happening in the present with my grandmother’s voice narrating it from the past. So sometime during my MacDowell Fellowship, surrounded by snow in my little cabin, I felt that the film could only work, for me, if it was also about the present. I returned to live in Mexico City as an adult no longer living with my father. I remember noticing things that are likely taken for granted by people who never leave home—like how the gas tanks are sold or the distinct soundscape of Mexico City with all its traveling vendors. Being aware of the gas running out changes your relationship with your surroundings, with what you need, and with people. El General is that return to Mexico, to feel my grandmother’s presence in that moment of my life, going out to the streets and filming. It was incredible.
When you live in two countries and you have a reference of how life is outside, it allows you to see things differently. When you are able to go away and then return, you see things that are so particular and intimate to your city that you might not otherwise see.
D: Related to El General, I found the scenes in Tepito very interesting. In 2006, that neighborhood was still considered one of the most dangerous places, which made it an area most people avoided. In addition, Tepito was suddenly all over the news due to Marcelo Ebrard, then Mexico City governor, now the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, launching an attack to “decriminalize” the area. How did you gain access to Tepito, and how did you decide that this was something you wanted to film?
NA: At that moment, I was thinking a lot about who has access to memory—who has the right to keep a record and the right to remember. The idea of collective memory, that becomes the memory of a country. My great-grandfather has an entire house dedicated to his memory that I could access. As his great-granddaughter, it is a privilege to be able to go there and find traces of my family’s past. It made me aware of all those who do not have that privilege. For example, there is a scene of a building being demolished in Tepito. When you entered this building, right before it was going to be demolished, there was a mural, photographs scattered on the floors, and many things that would have been preserved if those people’s memories had been valued as part of a collective history. I saw the demolition of that building as an erasure of memories. I was very conscious of who gets to participate in the writing of history and who does not. It relates to Patricio Guzmán’s idea that “a country without a documentary is a country without memory.”
D: It’s so interesting to hear about this. It’s the first time I’ve been able to see memories of that moment in Tepito that don’t come from TV news. I think it was the first time I watched a documentary that talked about it without all the layers of politics that were added on.
NA: I am very interested in something you said. You mentioned that you watch El General knowing the context of Tepito, which allows you to have a very particular reading because you know Mexico City and its history, having lived there in those years. However, foreign audiences or those who were not raised in Mexico City watch those scenes very differently. Something I have always been interested in is how to make a film that works for both audiences. It is not about defining a demographic that will be the film’s audience, but rather understanding that different people will access different parts of the film. It’s thinking about the film having layers rather than one absolute reading. What is seen, experienced, and understood in a documentary is not constant; you see something that others don’t see, and maybe someone else who is not from Mexico City sees things that you do not see. This also points to our blind spots—what do I see, what I don’t see, and who sees what. For me, documentary always plays with this idea. Which I love.
D: How has it been to show your films outside and in Mexico and to interact with your audiences?
NA: It is closely related to what we were discussing earlier. It is not just about the country where the work is shown; it is also about the context, whether it’s shown at a film festival, an art museum, or on public TV. This is what makes it interesting. What has been very sad for me in the last ten years is that I haven’t been able to travel much with my films. When I made Everything Else, my son Gray was born, so I couldn’t travel with the film. And then with Users, the pandemic happened. It’s been a long time since I was able to travel with my films, which I’ve come to realize is such an invaluable part of making films.
D: Returning to the topic of access, how was access to El Velador?
NA: My family is from Culiacan, Sinaloa. Having access to the cemetery was partly thanks to my family’s history there.
I made El Velador without a film crew. It worried me to bring someone into a dangerous situation and be responsible for them. I was accompanied by a family friend from Culiacan, who had a big truck and was a kind of protection for me, and I had an arrangement with my father to contact him every three hours when I was filming. Should he not hear from me then he knew to worry. It was also a film that required a lot of waiting—for the light, for something to happen. Being a woman filming served me well there because I was in a very “macho” world where I was neither taken seriously nor posed a threat to anyone. The question can be asked differently. Who was not going to give me access at that moment? Maybe today is different, but who was going to tell me, “I will not let you film me?” That did happen, but not many times.
In documentary, we abide by a practice of getting releases from the people we film. This seems straightforward enough, but in many contexts, the standard forms we give people to sign are so foreign to their realities that they don’t hold real meaning. When I tried to explain that I was making an artistic documentary or something for film festivals there was no context for them to really understand what I was referring to. So while I always got consent to film I felt in many cases it was blind consent, because most of the people I was filming didn’t really understand what they were giving me permission to do. Is that really permission?
At the end of El Velador, I was threatened. That’s why I stopped filming. It was very complicated because the people that allowed me to film were also put at risk. My intention had been to “do good” and I didn’t know how to reckon with the reality that I had endangered them. It provoked a lot of conflict to think about what was my relationship with the people that I filmed and what was my responsibility to them, and what it was to have resources and power. I had somewhere to go, but the people I filmed with did not. In the U.S., filmmakers protect themselves with permits and such. I did ask for permission, but did they ever understand what they were consenting to?
On the other hand, experiencing this threat informed the edit of the film. I understood in a way that I hadn’t before what it really means to live in fear of violence. A violence that is invisible and, as such, omnipresent. I wanted the audience to really feel that by making a film about violence without violence. A film they couldn’t look away from.
D: When El Velador began to be shown at festivals in Mexico City, there was a lot of curiosity surrounding it. At the time, it felt like we were glimpsing something so unknown. We did not have much information on how the violence was unfolding in our country, and there was a lot less media coverage on the topic. However, more than ten years later, I see it in a completely different light.
NA: Having grown up in Culiacan, Sinaloa, we have lived and coexisted with El Narco our whole lives. It is part of our culture and history. My dad was a rancher, and sometimes the cowboys in the ranch did "trips" that would allow them to buy a new boiler or new boots. It was not foreign to our everyday life, nor was it viewed as morally wrong because there wasn’t the violence we see today and we didn’t have addiction issues in Mexico back then.
Things changed in 2006 when President Calderon declared war against the drug traffickers. Among other things, he took away their right to justice and to a fair trial. I thought it was unfair because the lack of economic opportunity and education that was making drug trafficking and immigration enticing was a result of political and socioeconomic conditions, not individualized moral choices. How could we see that what was happening was a consequence of the political and socioeconomic situation of our country and even the world? It was not solely the responsibility of those people who were depicted as monsters with no ethics. I wanted to humanize the context and the situation. I grew up there, and it was a presence I lived with all my life and understood differently.
D: When I watch El General and then El Velador, I believe that the answers are there. We can understand what happens in El Velador because of what happens in El General. Although you did not know what would happen in linear time, your camera captured it, allowing us to analyze and discuss it. It is amazing to think that the footage is now in a documentary.
In El Velador you worked alone. How did you work in your other films?
NA: It has always changed. My background is in photography, so my starting point was very individualistic or solitary. I made my short film All Water Has a Perfect Memory by myself when I was doing my MFA in photography. I asked my parents and my brother to record themselves; they were not interviewed as might have been expected in film school. Making my first film in this context gave me a lot of freedom to define what film meant to me. Al Otro Lado was a combination of shooting alone and with Chuy Chavez, a really talented Mexican cinematographer. When Magdiel crossed the border, I was filming alone. My father accompanied me to the border and waited for me. I was a very young filmmaker, so I said to Magdiel he could come in the car with us from Culiacan to the border, but my dad said no, that there should be limits. So I shot the farewell party, and then separately we drove to the border.
It was a complex legal situation because I have dual citizenship. If you cross the border with no documents, you are undocumented. If I’d been caught crossing with someone undocumented, I would be aiding and abetting. I thought that as journalists we were protected but I was told that was not true and that I would need to prove that I hadn’t encouraged or paid for Magdiel to cross the border undocumented. So we had a lot of paperwork to demonstrate that I did not pay Magdiel to participate in the film. In this case, if I’d paid Magdiel then it could have been argued that he crossed the border for the film.
In documentary ethics, we are always trying to have rules of how things should be done to be ethical. But ethics change with different contexts. I don’t believe that there can be a singular handbook of rules to follow. At best, we have guidelines and questions that we need to consider, but each situation requires that filmmakers make unique ethical and moral judgments. Users was the first film that I made outside of Mexico. I did it after Everything Else, where I worked with cinematographer Lorenzo Hagerman. I was interested in achieving a controlled image, like in fiction, but within the context of a documentary. I missed the improvisational aspect of documentary—responding to the world that presents itself, having the agility to change course, to move quickly, to be spontaneous, to be surprised by life, and respond to it. My brother-in-law Bennett Cerf was amazing to work with in part because we are so different. Where I might intuitively keep the camera steady and allow life to move within the frame, he pushed me to move the camera, to displace it, to seek perspectives other than at eye level, and lenses other than those that approximate our vision.
I have edited all of my films, but not in isolation. There have always been people supporting me, advising me, and providing feedback. In the case of Users, the pandemic affected us most in that we couldn’t have work-in-progress screenings as we were finishing the edit. I had always done small 3 to 4 people screenings, not only to hear what people understood of the film as it was coming together but also to watch it through their eyes to get a fresh perspective of the material I’d been belaboring for months. Obviously, this was impossible, especially in the early months of the pandemic. When you send a link of your film to someone, and then you have a Zoom meeting to talk about it, the immediacy of their reaction, the felt sensation in the room, and the audience as your proxy are lost. You completely miss the possibility of looking at the film through their eyes as they’re watching and instead get a processed articulation of their thoughts.
D: When it comes to your artistic approach, you often include yourself in your films. For instance, you provide the narration. For other emerging women filmmakers, making the decision to include themselves in their films can be difficult.
NA: On one side, the need to include my voice comes out of necessity. It has never been my plan to have a narration from the onset. With El General, it had to be my voice because it is my family, and in Users, similarly. In Users, the topic of motherhood is stronger than what I originally thought it would be. I knew that becoming a mother had provoked making the film, but I didn’t anticipate that it would have such a strong presence in the film. What was important for me was to make a film about a big abstract idea from a woman’s perspective. That the “female” voice, domestic space, and motherhood weren’t restricted to be small and enclosed but rather could be expansive and part of “big” dialogues. The choice to include my children was a complicated ethical decision, but for me, the clear line was that Users is not a home movie. My children are participating in the film more like collaborators, not in the intimacy of who they are.
Something that can be difficult, from a gendered or cultural perspective that is used to being treated as inferior, is feeling entitled to talk about something that transcends. We frequently feel we have to stay within our context often because there’s been a lack of self-representation. It is indeed necessary that we self-represent but that should not be a limitation.
D: To wrap up our interview, is there anything else you would like to add that I did not ask about?
NA: Something that is hard for me to express within the context of my retrospective is that the work that I always go back to is my first film, All Water Has a Perfect Memory. Back then, I did not see myself as a filmmaker and did not aspire to be one when I was making it in art school. It was an organic film focused on a process. It was not like it is now in the industry, where the ending of the film is very clear, with a specific festival or streamer as a target. I was able to work from a different perspective, where everything is possible. I was guided by the process and learned that the process will take you where the film has to go. Going back to that idea has been fundamental.
Also, throughout all of these years, I have felt well accompanied and supported by a world of documentary filmmakers, mostly women and mostly Latinas, though of course not all. It has also been super important to feel that I come from a trajectory of filmmakers—like having film roots. For example, my work would not be what it is without the path that was laid out before me by someone like Lourdes Portillo. All of these women who have made films before me or have been there, making films alongside me, like Alex Rivera, Cristina Ibarra, Tatiana Huezo, and Daniela Alatorre (with whom I always collaborate in some capacity). It is not only about me, or who did the cinematography or the production. It would make me sad not to contextualize that lineage. I feel very thankful. I do not walk alone on this path nor am I forging a new one alone. None of us are. A long time ago, Lourdes Portillo wrote a recommendation letter for me for the Guggenheim Fellowship. When I wrote to thank her, she told me, “It’s your turn to support the next woman behind you.” (Te toca apoyar a la que sigue.) And that’s how we forge ahead.
Mariana Sanson is a 2022 Documentary Magazine Editorial Fellow and the communications manager at Chicken & Egg Pictures.