By Juan Medina
With three documentary features, MacArthur “Genius Award” Fellow director Natalia Almada had made a solid career in non-fiction filmmaking, screening her work at prestigious film festivals around the world including Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight, Sundance, Tribeca, MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight. In 2016 she decided to make her fiction debut with the feature film Everything Else / Todo lo demás starring Academy Award nominee Adriana Barraza. The film, which participated at numerous film festivals including New York, San Francisco, Rome, and Morelia, and was selected one of the best films of that year (Amy Taubin, Artforum), is having its world digital premiere as part of The Cinema Tropical Collection. We spoke to Natalia on occasion of the launching of her film on TVOD.
I would like to start by asking you about the relationship between this, your first fiction feature film, and the rest of your work, which has been more limited to documentary and photography. In what ways does one record inform or contaminate the other?
For me it’s a very natural continuation of my work. El Velador (2011) is a documentary that is very close to fiction because of its minimalist approach. For me, the open narrative of El Velador lends itself to fiction. In terms of ways of working, it also allowed me to start feeling what it is to have a more controllable set since the watchman’s routine was so predictable that I could start to anticipate and choreograph my camera with his actions, the light and the environment or set.
On several occasions you have cited sound designer Alejandro de Icaza —who this time also appears as an actor— as one of your main collaborators. What is your approach to sound design and how important is it to your work?
Sound design is extremely important to me, even from the writing of the script. And it was also one of the biggest differences between documentary and fiction that I didn’t anticipate. The first things we filmed for Everything Else were the office scenes for which we adapted an event hall. When you shoot for a documentary you have the ambient or background sound of the moment. But in a fiction set you don’t —instead you just have the dialogue. When I saw the first rushes of Everything Else, which had almost no sound, I thought that everything felt dead and flat. It was because of the lack of ambient sound, which we still had to build.
Alejandro de Icaza has been one of my closest collaborators. He made the sound design for El General, El Velador, Everything Else and we continue working together. He is also part of my production team, and in the case of Everything Else we had a problem with people we cast for the role of the angry business man and he stepped in. Dave Cerf also worked on the sound design for Everything Else. He and I worked side by side during editing, so that we gave the same narrative importance to the sound as we did to the image. He is also a music composer and composed throughout the whole process.
In other works you have studied, in an oblique way, more crude or evident forms of violence. Everything Else, on the other hand, involves an approach to a more subtle type of violence. Could you tell us about this violence and in what ways it does or does not demand a different approach?
Drug violence is highly visible on the news as well as in movies and series. But what interests me is the invisible violence. Even when we talk about drug violence or violence against women, for example, it’s always the morbid events that we see, but behind those events there is a very deep violence, which is the constant fear that it causes. That kind of violence is invisible, and it usually touches us all, not just the direct victims that become statistics.
The victim of violence in Everything Else is Doña Flor, a bureaucrat. Her role in society is such that it is invisible. After years in the bureaucratic system, that invisibility has become internalized and has dehumanized her. The film is about her struggle against that inner invisibility and her struggle to feel human.
For this film you cast renowned actress Adriana Barraza. The film has very few dialogues, therefore much of her acting involves gestures and body work. How was the process working with the actress?
Adriana is an amazing actress and the movie really is hers. I wanted to work with her precisely because she has an incredible ability to convey emotions through her gestures without saying anything. A sigh, a look…. it tells you everything. Adriana was the only professional actor in the film - the others are non-actors. Her experience as an acting teacher was also a great advantage because she knew how to lead non-actors.
Seeing the way you portray Flor in her home environment I can't help but remember Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman. Does that comparison seem accurate to you? Which artists or filmmakers have influenced your approach to cinema?
Without a doubt, Akerman is an influence and inspiration in my work, also Lourdes Portillo and Agnès Varda. I think there is a very interesting challenge in portraying the domestic space because it’s usually a women’s space and therefore little appreciated in the cinema.
