OVID.tv, the innovative subscription video-on-demand service, has launched the complete filmography of Mexican-American director Natalia Almada, recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award, two-time winner of the Sundance Documentary Directing Award, and a influential voice in international cinema, whose films have been screened at numerous film festivals and venues including Cannes, Sundance, Tribeca, New York, and Rome, among many others.
The five films by Almada currently streaming exclusively on OVID.tv, as a SVOD premiere are her short film All Water Has a Perfect Memory, and her documentary films Al Otro Lado, El General, and El Velador, plus her debut fiction Everything Else (Todo lo demás). Her most recent film, Users, will have a North American theatrical release later this year.
All Water Has a Perfect Memory is a poignant experimental documentary that explores the effects of tragedy and remembrance on a bi-cultural family. At seven months old, filmmaker Almada lost her two-year-old sister, Ana Lynn, in a drowning accident at her childhood home in Mexico. Inspired by an essay written by Toni Morrison, in which she speaks of the Mississippi River’s ability to conjure memories, this moving piece serves as a meditation on the cultural and gender differences between the filmmaker’s North American mother and Mexican father in the face of their daughter’s death.
The proud Mexican tradition of corrido music—captured in the performances of Mexican band Los Tigres del Norte and the late Chalino Sanchez—provides both heartbeat and backbone to Al Otro Lado, a rich examination of songs, drugs and dreams along the U.S./Mexico border. The film follows Magdiel, an aspiring corrido composer from the drug capital of Mexico, as he faces two difficult choices to better his life: to traffic drugs or to cross the border undocumentedly into the United States.
Past and present collide in the extraordinarily well-crafted documentary El General, when filmmaker Almada, winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Directing Award for documentary, brings to life audio recordings she inherited from her grandmother. These recordings feature Alicia Calles’ reminiscences about her own father—Natalia’s great-grandfather—General Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary general who became president of Mexico in 1924. In his time, Calles was called “El Bolshevique” and “El Jefe Máximo”, or “the foremost chief”. Today, he remains one of Mexico’s most controversial figures, illustrating both the idealism and injustices of the country’s history.
From dusk to dawn El Velador accompanies Martin, the guardian angel whom, night after night, watches over the extravagant mausoleums of some of Mexico's most notorious Drug Lords. In the labyrinth of the cemetery, this film about violence without violence reminds us how, in the turmoil of Mexico's bloodiest conflict since the Revolution, ordinary life persists and quietly defies the dead. A portrait of the daily life of the cemetery allows us to see the intersection between those who make a living there and those who rest there-innocent or guilty. El Velador is a film about violence without violence.
Everything Else tells the story of Doña Flor (played by Academy Award nominated actress Adriana Barraza), who works as a bureaucrat. It is in everything that comprises her, her non-descript beige blouse, practical heels, and knee-length skirts. For over three decades she has attended frustrated and indignant citizens to whom she is nothing but an invisible, lifeless bureaucrat, and has returned each evening to her cat and solitary apartment where she makes obsessive lists of the people she attended to during the day. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that bureaucracy is one of the worst forms of violence, Everything Else explores the interior life of Doña Flor as she attempts to resurface. A kind of “observational narrative” the film is a mesmerizing contemplation on solitude.
