MEXICO CITY — As a young girl growing up in 1980s Mexico, the idea of becoming a filmmaker was almost unthinkable for Fernanda Valadez. Apart from a local movie club at the university, there was no cinema in Guanajuato. Women made films were rare.
“The dream of making cinema was something far away,” she recalled recently. “We grew up with the feeling that making films was very difficult.”
This dream became a reality 30 years later. Valadez’s debut film, “Identifying Features,” won two top prizes at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020, and this year it won best picture, director and screenplay, among other prizes, at the Ariel Awards, Mexico’s equivalent of the Oscars.
After decades of struggle for recognition in an industry dominated mainly by men, Valadez, a woman filmmaker, is setting the Mexican cinema ablaze. She has released more work than her male peers and won major awards.
In a society where machismo has often held women back, and gender-based violence is the norm, the recognition of female filmmakers shows a larger social change. It is both a result of a strengthened feminist movement in Mexico as well as a urgent conversation about sexism around the world.
“It’s been years in the making,” Valadez said. “But I’m very happy to be part of a generation of women telling powerful stories.”
Valadez and her fellow filmmakers have had to work hard to get here.
Tatiana Huezo is a Salvadoran/Mexican director who was awarded the Ariels’ directing prize in 2017. Her latest film, “Prayers for the Stolen,” which received a special mention at the Cannes Film Festival this year, is Mexico’s candidate for the best international feature Oscar at the 2022 Academy Awards, and last week made it onto the shortlist of finalists for the statuette. If nominated, Huezo would become the first Mexican woman to compete for the award, even as fellow countrymen like Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro have dominated the top prizes of late.
Huezo’s mother used to sneak her daughter into the cinema when she was a small girl to see art-house films. The director remembers being enchanted and at times frightened by the films of David Lynch and François Truffaut. But when she began studying at Mexico’s Film Training Center, she found herself confronted by sexism.
Huezo had enrolled to become a cinematographer, but once in school, male directors wouldn’t take her on their projects, so she ended up having to both shoot and direct her own.
“They would say that ‘it’s too heavy with the cameras,’” she said.
Valadez had to deal with similar problems at the Film Training Center. There, she was one among only four women in a class containing 15. She stated that some female students at film school were asked inappropriate questions such as whether they were planning to have children or if their ability to transport equipment.
“We women face more filters,” she said. “Men in these generations are brought up to believe that destiny is in their hands.”
Sexism has long been an issue in Mexican film schools, said Maricarmen de Lara, a feminist filmmaker and professor who was director of the film school at Mexico’s National Autonomous University from 2015 to 2019.
As a young student, the industry was even worse. Sets were ruled by men. “They were men who minimized the work of women, and they did it publicly,” Lara said, adding that a few were violent. “There were some cinematographers who wouldn’t even accept a woman assistant photographer.”
But women have still managed to make films in the country for decades, said Arantxa Luna, the critic and screenwriter, pointing to Adela Sequeyro, who worked as a producer and director in the 1930s, and María Novaro, who along with Lara, was part of the feminist collective Cine Mujer in the 1970s and ’80s.
The legacy of the feminist film movement is especially lasting for Mexican documentaries: Between 2010, and 2020, women directed a third (compared to 16 percent of fiction films).
Still, it’s been an uphill battle.
“Fifteen, twenty years ago in Mexico there weren’t that many women directors,” said the documentarian Natalia Almada, who won a 2009 Sundance directing award. “Even just being out in the field as a woman with a camera making films meant something.”
Women have had an impact other than directing on-camera. Behind some of Mexico’s most prominent male filmmakers of the last 20 years have also been producers like Bertha Navarro, whose credits include several of Guillermo del Toro’s most acclaimed films, and Mónica Lozano Serrano, who was an associate producer on Alejandro González Iñarritu’s “Amores Perros.” A former president of the Mexican film academy, Lozano has in recent years defended public funding for cinema in Mexico.
Meanwhile, the Hollywood success of Iñarritu, Cuarón and del Toro, nicknamed “the three amigos,” The industry in Mexico has also seen an increase in film funding and attention. Almada said they “turned a kind of international gaze on Mexico as a place where interesting work is being made.”
This has led to a surge in Mexican cinema and an increase in the number films made by women. In 2000, “Amores Perros” was one of just 28 Mexican feature films; in 2019, there were more than 200, according to official figures. In 2008, only five films were directed and produced by women. By 2018, this number had risen to 47.
As society changed, filmmaking evolved. In Mexico, a growing feminist movement has been taking to the streets, calling for an end of gender-based violence and the #MeToo campaign.
Valadez said the cultural shift provoked by the #MeToo movement became apparent in the reception to her previous project, “The Darkest Days of Us” (2017), the story of a woman haunted by her sister’s death, directed by Valadez’s producing partner, Astrid Rondero.
“Before #MeToo became viral, when we were still editing, there were comments that the film even felt aggressive toward men,” she said. After the movement exploded, Valadez said, “it began to be understood that it was a film that talked about what #MeToo was putting on the table, the microaggressions, the violence, the abuse.”
The impact of #MeToo has been felt throughout Mexico’s film industry. In September, the activist group #YaEsHora (It’s Time), in collaboration with the Boston Center for Latin America and eight Mexican production companies, started the country’s first “comprehensive protocol against harassment,” a series of procedures and regulations to prevent and punish sexual abuse in the film industry.
The Film Training Center, where Huezo as well as Valadez studied together, announced that half the seats in its main courses would now be reserved for women.
Directors say that there is still much to be done. Out of the more than 100 Mexican feature film produced in 2020, when the industry was hit by the pandemic in Mexico, only 17 percent were directed in 2020. This is down from 20 percent in 2018 and 25 percent in 2018.
“There’s still a long way to go — it’s not yet equal,” Huezo said. “And I hope we get there because it’s going to enrich cinema so much.”
Source: NY Times
