Join us this Friday, April 9 at 7pm EDT for a special conversation with director Natalia Almada and Academy Award nominee actress Adriana Barraza on the feature film Everything Else / Todo lo demás following the digital premiere of the film as part of The Cinema Tropical Collection. The conversation will be streamed lived on Cinema Tropical’s Facebook account and will be moderated by Carlos A. Gutiérrez, executive director of Cinema Tropical.
Selected as one of the best films of the year (Amy Taubin, Artforum), and winner of the Golden Gate Award for Best Film at the San Francisco Film Festival, Everything Else stars Barraza as Doña Flor, a 63-year-old bureaucrat living in Mexico City. Almada's debut fiction film explores the interior life of Doña Flor as she awakens from her bureaucratic malaise and yearns to become visible again. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s idea that bureaucratic dehumanization is a brutal form of violence, the story ultimately becomes a mesmerizing contemplation on solitude.
Almada is a 2012 MacArthur “Genius Award” Fellow and recipient of the 2009 Sundance Documentary Directing Award for her film El General. Her 2011 film El Velador about violence in Mexico premiered at New Directors/New Films and the Cannes Film Festival Directors’ Fortnight. Her previous credits include “All Water Has a Perfect Memory, and Al Otro Lado. Her films have screened in film festivals, on public television and at museums around the world including The Museum of Modern Art in NY, The Museé d’Art Moderne in Paris, The 2008 Whitney Biennial and Documenta13. Her three feature documentaries broadcast on the award-winning series POV. on American public television, and she has received the Guggenheim, USA Artists and Alpert Fellowships and attended residencies at Cannes Film Festival’s Cinefondation, The MacDowell Colony and The Headlands Center for the Arts. She graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives between Mexico City and San Francisco.
Academy Award nominated actress Adriana Barraza began her acting career in the early 90s after years behind the camera. She acted has acted in theater, television and cinema throughout the years garnering the top national awards for her performance. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu cast her in Amores Perros in 1999 and in Babel in 2006 for which she received Oscar, Golden Globe, and SAG nominations. Barraza created the Actors Workshop in Mexico City and now has her own acting school in Miami Florida.
