At only 29, the prolific Mexican director Nicolas Pereda has produced five films already.
As it happens with two of his contemporary Latin American directors– Carlos Reygadas and the Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel – Pereda will be having a retrospective of his films in the Yerbabuena Center for the Arts, which he will show throughout the month of October in San Francisco.
Born in Mexico City, Pereda studied film in his home country and later obtained a scholarship to an MFA program in York University in Toronto, Canada. For the past nine years, Pereda has been living between Toronto and Mexico City.
“Ever since I was 15, I would be recording on a digital camera, all day,” declared the young director at the International Film Festival in Cartagena de Indias in
Colombia last February.
Loved by critics, his films have been shown in film festivals in Cannes (France), Morelia (Mexico), and Valencia (Italy), where he received the award for best film in the Horizontes section for his most recent film, “El Verano de Goliat,” in 2010.
Canada has financed most of his films through public aids to artists. His modest way of shooting has allowed him to create five films in just a few years, because according to him, if he had more money, “nothing would change in terms of production, I think that money is not seen on the screen,” and he added that with more money, he would end up paying more to his collaborators. His first film, “¿Dónde están sus historias?” (2007), was made with approximately $30,000.
With a contemplative style and slight narration, Pereda creates a film d’auteur with a slow unfolding, and he has been compared to the Argentinean Lisandro Alonso and Filipino Raya Martín, in the line of contemporary directors who use long static shots, simple scripts, and cross the border between documentary and fiction. The obsessive nature with which he films character’s displacements evokes Eric Rohmer’s style, while the frontal static mise en scene evoke Belgian director Chantal Ackerman.
A filmmaker of the quotidian, all of his films are under an hour and a half and work through a series of vignettes that invite the viewer to watch as they simultaneously follow characters who jump from film to film, as is the case with Teresa Sánchez and Gabino Rodríguez who appear in most of his films.
Between 2008 and 2009, he made “Juntos,” and “Perpetuum Mobile,” films that can be watched in progression due to the cross-referencing that exists between them.
Barely following a plot, Pereda portrays the daily existence of his characters, their conversations, behaviors and their uneventful daily lives.
Differing from Reygadas, Pereda’s films are more immediate and contain elements of documentary, leaving nothing to the imagination of the viewers. Pereda is more
of an entomologist than an academic. Living between Toronto and Mexico City most likely infused him his depictions with a distance and almost formal way of seeing his home country. However, his professionalism does not cease to capture the every day of his films.
So you can have an idea, the spectator will be able to find static shots of a character pealing an orange for a minute and a half, or looking directly at the camera, with an
off screen voice. “When I imagine a scene, I am writing it and I already have an idea of what it will be like. It’s like an understanding that things will work out this way,”
Pereda explained.
His most recent production, “Verano de Goliat,” (2010), and “¿Dónde están sus historias” are perhaps the ones that have the most social backdrop, by touching upon issues of violence, family neglect and poverty. But again, his professionalism colors the films in a formalism that makes them weaver between documentary and fiction. The frankness of characters in front of the camera and the realism of the
dialogue contrasts with the mise en scene of the films.
His work involves non-professional actors. “I simply give them a script and it’s like a game, I have worked with kids before, and it’s all like a continuing game,” he said.
It is as if he had communicated the idea to the actors, and they had freely developed it in front of the camera. Pereda explained further that, “the relationship with actors, is very much like relationships with people. I don’t understand books to direct actors, because they are like manuals to direct computers, to direct them like puppets. Basically, you want them to do whatever it is you want, and with everyday people, it’s the same thing, we want people to do things for us all the time, and it’s a different thing to ask a father or a friend for the favor.”
“Todo, en fin, el silencio lo ocupaba” (2010) is his only documentary so far, and probably his most formal work, with a mise en scene orchestrated to the poem “Primer sueño” by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, by his favorite actress, Jesusa
Rodríguez.
His only short film, “Entrevista con la tierra,” is a fascinating study on the internal pain that the death of a child causes and how it affects the lives of his family and friends.
His new project it titled, “Los mejores temas,” with which he hopes to end the cycle of fictional characters he has created.
Although Pereda’s universe gravitates around the circuit of festivals and museum retrospectives, his work is sufficiently accessible for the general public, for the
freshness of his dialogues and the vernacular Mexican language. Although his films contain artistry, they are not overly academic or elitist, and belong outside of just museum exhibits and intellectual circles.
Translated by Alejandra Cuéllar