Still from You Were My First Boyfriend
By Pola Pucheta
You Were My First Boyfriend—which premiered at SXSW this spring—expands traditional notions of the documentary genre. Through re-enactments of her adolescence, director Cecilia Aldarondo processes moments or fantasies from her past. With a sharp humor similar to PEN15, grounded by the emotional weight of real people, the film expertly recreates the searing burn of a high school crush or the first experience of social rejection by peers or family. It’s a film that compels you to call up your childhood best friend and tell them thank you.
The poetry at the center of Cecilia’s work is a nod to our fraught but beautiful helplessness to the circumstances of life. Ahead of the film’s upcoming theatrical run at the DCTV Firehouse prior to its global release on HBO, we sit down to discuss the award-winning director’s third feature—a sage reminder that being subject to the whims of destiny is the very thing that opens us up to surprise, to wonder.
How would you describe your creative practice?
That's such a big question. I would describe it as—and this is gonna sound dramatic—my reason for living? I don't really know who I would be without my creative practice, without being an artist. I would say it's deeply collaborative. It is often very emotional, and always evolving.
That definitely comes across in your work. Would you say you feel most connected or dedicated to a specific medium or craft? Or to the title of writer and filmmaker? Is there an intentionality to dipping into many different types of artmaking?
I definitely identify as a filmmaker. I am also a writer. I do a lot of writing as part of my filmmaking and in a previous life—I was a critic. Writing has always been important to me. But I'm definitely a filmmaker who works increasingly across genres within filmmaking.
You’ve said that the ideation or development process for the film happened over the course of many years. How do you know when a project is done?
I mean, the most obvious answer is when you run out of money. Filmmaking is a very resource intensive endeavor—it's not cheap to make films. It's part of what makes it hard to create work. Sometimes, there's just the real constraint of recognizing that you have your built-in deadlines, whether you want them or not. The other part of it is the process of elimination that happens when editing. If you've tried something enough times, I think a film eventually reveals itself. It surfaces and it's almost like a kind of whittling away where the thing kind of comes into shape. That's been my experience—it's this very strange feeling of like, ‘oh, I guess it's done now.’
Still from You Were My First Boyfriend
I think one of the things that became clear to me when watching You Were My First Boyfriend is that the story might have been one thing initially, but then by the time you got to the end of it it had evolved into something else. Is that something that you find is unique to documentary?
I think documentary filmmaking is particularly unique in this way that it is by necessity a medium of discovery. It's not a medium of invention in the same way that fiction filmmaking is. It's not that there aren't surprises along the way when you're making fiction work, but with documentary, your job as a documentarian is not to try and control the world, it's to let yourself be surprised by the world. If you try to exert too much control in a documentary, you lose precisely what's special about it. I think of it as a medium of wonder.
And some of the things that have meant the most to me as a documentarian have been happy accidents that I could not have expected. That’s one of the things that I really love about the editing process and working with an editor—you reverse engineer it. You craft the structure and the story in the aftermath of production, not really during. I mean, you can have a hunch and say, ‘I want these kinds of things to happen,’ or ‘I want to capture these kinds of encounters or spaces or ideas.’ But you know, I think it's a huge mistake to try and pre-script a documentary. I think that that inhibits the beauty and the surprise that is one of my favorite things about the genre.
As a filmmaker and a storyteller, I'm sure things like perspective and voice are devices that you think about. What advice would you give to artists who are looking to develop their specific and unique point of view in their art making?
This is gonna sound kind of cruel, but like, don't assume that you're the first person to have an idea. I think one of the best things people can do is immerse themselves in previous work by other artists. Not to be overwhelmed by what's out there, but to put oneself in conversation with it. Think about it as a community exercise. When I'm teaching documentary to my students, very often they will say that they want to make a film, but they haven't actually studied documentary. They arrive with preconceived notions of what the form is, but there's so much more possible.
For example, with You Were My First Boyfriend, reenactment is a huge strategy in the film. I wanted to see what other artists had done previously, and—rather than feeling like I'm in competition with that—be in conversation with those efforts. I think, you know, nerding out and really immersing yourself in pre-existing work can be a really wonderful way to get ideas and get excited about what you want to do.
Still from You Were My First Boyfriend
Can you describe what your curiosity looks like? Or what your specific process of exploring things looks like?
It really depends on each film that I make and I try not to make the same film more than once. Stylistically, my films are all quite different from one another even though there's some through lines. For example, there’s the theme of memory or some sort of social justice component to everything I do. But I tried to make films that don't look and sound like each other. Part of that is achieved by listening to the idea and entering into a symbiotic spiritual state with the artwork that you're making.
To me, the research process really helps me get in sync with the project, whether it's with the themes or the style. My first film had a lot to do with the AIDS crisis at its height. I watched every film about AIDS that I could find, I studied visual artists from that time period, and I read a lot of history books about activism. For my second feature, which is about the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, I read about disaster capitalism and was also looking at films with a prismatic structure. It really depends on the project. In all cases it's a sort of a process of immersion into the unique terrain of those ideas and those gut instincts that I want to pursue.
What is a piece of advice that you’d offer to a younger version of yourself?
A younger version of myself? I think I would probably say ‘You are an artist’ because I didn't really finish my first film until I was 36. I spent a huge amount of my earlier life being obsessed with art and wanting to be around artists, having a kind of artist's disposition, and yet thinking I didn't have the talent to be an artist. I think it was because of the way I grew up, I was raised with very traditional notions of what an artist is. I think my initial sensibilities were a lot more verbal than they were visual in certain ways.
I hadn't met a filmmaker until I was working at a film festival after college. I spent a lot of time talking myself out of that and procrastinating on what I really wanted, which was to be an artist. It took me a really long time to finally claim that. I think it can be extremely intimidating. We have these really damaging ideas of artistic genius that are often very rooted in white, male, Western notions that don't really serve us, especially if that's not who we are.
I love how you describe the genre of documentary as one of wonder, surprise and curiosity. With my final question, I'll ask, what's been the most surprising thing that you've realized along your creative path?
I'm surprised that I'm still making films. When I set out to make my first film, all I wanted to do was finish it. I wasn't thinking you know, distribution, or who was going to see it. I literally wanted to make a movie that would mean something to me and my family.
What's been surprising is that I've managed to continue. Every time I finish a new film, I'm like, ‘How the hell did I do that? Things in the documentary landscape are so challenging. The word sustainability is so elusive it's almost laughable. There are very profound practical constraints, but particularly for filmmakers from marginal identities and backgrounds. People who don't have access to resources, to the same pathways that more privileged filmmakers do. I’m shocked that I'm in a position to make films and that I'm still doing it. Every day I feel this incredible sense of luck and blessing.
I share your sense of gratitude that you're able to make films and that I'm able to witness them. It's something that I hope to be able to share with other people.
Yes, we're doing film festivals at the moment with our air date in November. I want people to see this film in movie theaters whenever possible. Eventually, it will be available worldwide on HBO.
