Coinciding with the world premiere of the most recent films by directors Cecilia Aldarondo, Rodrigo Reyes and Michèle Stephenson at the 2020 edition of the Tribeca Film Festival scheduled for April that year, Cinema Tropical was planning a public conversation with the three filmmakers to exchange perspectives on their own artistic practices. Then COVID-19 happened, and all of the plans changed.
Despite the fact that the premieres were then cancelled (eventually the three films were screened a year later, at this year’s edition of the Tribeca Film Festival), we decided to move forward with the roundtable, and recorded this conversation with the three directors on April 18, 2020, in which they discuss their own careers and how have they sorted numerous adversities throughout the years in order to create a vibrant and influential filmography.
Since the talk was recorded at the beginning of the pandemic, and since the three of them premiered their films during these convoluted times, Distribution Advocates and Cinema Tropical thought it would be a good opportunity to bring them back to share their experiences on that front.
Join us on Wednesday, December 15 at 6pm EST for a follow up-conversation with these three filmmakers on Cinema Tropical’s Twitter Spaces (@cinematropical), moderated by Carlos A. Gutiérrez, Executive Director of Cinema Tropical.
Aldarondo, Reyes, and Stephenson, who happen to be Latinx directors, are at the forefront of American non-fiction cinema. The three of them have been able to build strong and powerful filmographies despite challenging contexts, and have become key figures in the documentary world advocating for better professional practices, particularly in reference to underrepresented filmmakers. Below is an abridged version of the original recorded conversation.
Carlos Gutiérrez: To start off, can each of you tell us a little bit about your background? How did you decide to become filmmakers and how do you marry your professional backgrounds with your filmmaking activities?
Cecilia Aldarondo: I did not train as a filmmaker, I didn't go to film school. I finished my first film when I was 36 but I have always been involved in cinema in various ways. I studied visual art. I wrote art criticism and then I did a PhD and I was always very much a cinephile. My first job out of college was at the Florida Film Festival. And I think that's where I probably discovered documentary film, by watching submissions to that festival.
But I was always a little bit terrified by the idea of making art myself. And so I became a filmmaker partly in a fateful way where my mother discovered a family archive of home movies and slides. That discovery catalyzed a bunch of memories of my family; about my uncle's untimely death of AIDS, which became the subject of my first feature documentary, Memories of a Penitent Heart.
Part of the reason I think I turned to filmmaking was because I found academic writing limiting and I wanted to speak to a more general public. I wanted to make work that would be creatively exciting and meaningful, and I just fell in love with filmmaking after that first experience.
Rodrigo Reyes: Well, thanks for sharing, Cecilia, that's a really interesting path and journey to filmmaking. In my case I've always been interested in cinema, ever since I was a little kid. It just wasn't something that I could really pursue, through film school for instance, because there was a feeling in my family, especially coming from my dad, that this was not something that you can raise a family with. And in many ways he's right, the irony.
I studied political science. I traveled a lot during college to Spain and Mexico and I grew up between Mexico and the US. I constantly had two different reference points. Mexico is very Americanized so you get to see a lot of American films there. But we also have a huge tradition of cinema. So I was five years old watching films by Pedro Infante and Cantinflas and also combining that with big Hollywood films that made it down to Mexico.
Once I finished college, I felt like I could start on my own path because I had fulfilled this achievement of getting a degree. And I was actually the first in a big circle of my family in the US to get a degree. The reason I began working on documentaries was because I felt like, “Well, I can afford a camera. I can afford some microphones.” It’s very ironic because documentaries are actually really expensive, especially in the US.
All of my films, even the one I premiered at Tribeca, have some significant portion of self financing. I feel like that has been what has jump started every project, is being able to put in time and money and get the concept going because it has just been very difficult, I think, to pitch an establishment that thinks documentaries should be this way or that way on how my ideas also make sense.
I've been able to do this because I also have a day job, like most of us. I work as a criminal interpreter in the California courts. So I have a completely different way of making a living and that has allowed me to continue investing in my own projects and, you know, they've all gotten support eventually.
Michèle Stephenson: It's really interesting to hear from both of you because I feel that there are a lot of intersections in our journeys. I came very late to film. I always loved film and the arts. I actually wanted to be a dancer and that was not quite accepted by my family, in a way as a result of being a family of immigrants. I was also a first-generation college graduate within my immediate family.
But for me, politics and human rights issues were very present growing up. I think it had to do with both my Panamanian as well as Haitian roots and the kinds of discussions that were happening in our home. I also studied political science and traveled after graduating. I worked with the United Nations' Development Program in Africa and became very, very disillusioned with the systemic inequities and the industrial complexes that I felt I was becoming a part of. Eventually, I went to law school thinking that perhaps with a law degree I could try to make change on a different, more direct level.
It was actually my partner who introduced me to the notion of being able to make my own film. He was actually transitioning careers as well and was doing fiction, so I was on [his] sets for a while. I was exposed to the screenwriting process while still in law school, and the bug just bit me there. So I picked up a camera and started to take small workshops on weekends here in New York. Back in the day, there were these small kinds of collectives, Film and Visual Arts, AIVF. There were a lot of these little spots that actually don't exist anymore. Places you could go to create community and try to learn on your own with these small workshops for people who had other jobs, who were trying to learn but had to also pay the bills.
