Since its world premiere at SXSW, Mickey has reached audiences across different festival circuits. How has it felt to see people embrace a film that takes such an unconventional approach?
It was subversive to bring a film like this to such an important festival and see audiences embrace it so warmly. The film is quite alternative in its approach, so it was beautiful and hopeful to discover that these new ways of telling stories—ones that don't fit the traditional documentary mold, or even the conventions of experimental cinema—could connect with so many people.
We made it in a very independent, almost homegrown way, with the intention of showing what trans cinema can be and what it means to make films from our own perspectives. Through cinema, we can exercise agency and create the possibility of changing things.
How did the project begin, and how did it evolve into a feature made over ten years?
Mickey began recording herself when she was around eleven. When I met her, she was already experimenting with makeup and cat ears, and her performances were disruptive in the context of the Catholic school we attended in Sinaloa. For me, meeting her was extraordinary. I didn't have many clear references for what I was seeing, and she was already finding ways to express herself.
Years later, when we were living together in Mexico City, we started playing with the material she had accumulated. I made a short film, and the project gradually grew into something much bigger. At first, we had no funding. We began recording conversations about the film with a webcam, talking about what it could become. Those conversations eventually became one of the film's central elements.
The project developed over ten years. As it grew, we received support that allowed us to expand its possibilities, including the reenactments and other fictional elements. We were bringing together different languages that already existed in our lives, from social media and online identities to video games and cinema.
How did Mickey's presence shape the film's form?
I think each film has its own rhythm and its own search. I connect strongly with dreams, and that often leads me toward forms of storytelling that aren't conventional or linear.
With Mickey, the form responds to Mickey's freedom. She is free, diverse, joyful, and full of life. The film had to find a way of being as free as she is. That freedom became contagious: it shaped not only my own process, but also the experience of everyone involved in making the film.
Ultimately, I think this is a film made with a great deal of love. It grew out of a friendship and a shared desire to imagine what cinema could be.
There are several mirrors and projections throughout Mickey. The film opens with a projection onto the body, and later there's a projection inside the cave. How did you think about the relationship between looking, projection, and self-recognition?
Cinema was born, in a sense, as a mirror of the colonizer—a way of seeing and representing the world through a colonial gaze. The obsidian mirror offers a different possibility: instead of simply reflecting an image outward, it invites us to look inward.
I think it was through Mickey that I was able to tell this story. Mickey's diary was important in allowing us to access different parts of her life. Through writing, she confronted her past and her shadows. I accompanied her through that process, and the film emerged from being alongside her as she revisited those experiences.
