State of Grace

The various ways of storytelling have always fascinated me. Born in Mexico, I spent much of my adolescence in and out of the nearby building where my father worked. This building housed a bustling daily newspaper, and I was thrilled with every aspect of it. From the reporters with their stories about politics to the linotypes to the enormous press in the machine room. This is where our town’s stories were collected and distributed to be cherished and contested. To a 13-year-old girl, each issue was a miracle.

When my family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1959, filmmaking was as a spirit in the ether made manifest onscreen with every movie I went to. The storytelling miracle of the printing press was replaced by my wonder at the stories illuminating the screen: how I loved the movies! Over half a century later I can still recall seeing Hallelujah the Hills by Adolfus Mekas when I was 21, marveling at cinematic experiments that revealed to me unimagined frontiers. This led me on a path, lit by the films of Bresson, Maya Daren, Dali and many others. I was at once captivated and liberated by their risk taking.

Thus was born the ambition that carried me into adulthood: to learn how to make a film. With an intensity that is not uncommon among young immigrants escaping the traumas of adapting to a new life, I trained my focus on the Latin American diasporic experience.

Later, in the politically turbulent San Francisco of the late 1960s and early ‘70s, I had an opportunity to immerse myself in documentary filmmaking through an internship program and in a burgeoning independent film movement through an iconoclastic circle of friends populated by Latin American exiles and fellow art school students. Finding a personal way to confront social injustices in Latin America, I made a narrative film, After the Earthquake, with poet Nina Serrano, and then Oscar-nominated documentary, Las Madres, with Susana Blaustein. Just outside the frame of both films were memories of the journalists I’d seen in Mexico, chronicling the stories of our town. I had joined them in a larger human effort.

Still, I felt a profound need to experiment. By now I had studied groundbreaking movies by Fellini and Bunuel, as well as films by George Kuchar, Gunvor Nelson, James Broughton and other San Francisco artists who had become friends. I yearned to discover where films could go beyond the story, or perhaps better, how imagery and poetry, how humor and whimsy could expand the power of the story.

My opportunity was just around the corner. I started making a documentary that was a family story about my Uncle Oscar, but decided to escape the conventions of the documentary by structuring it as telenovela, drawing upon its elements of melodrama and over-the-top Mexican music. The result, The Devil Never Sleeps, was a baroque “docu-telenova,” the likes of which I had never seen before. The project showed me that playfulness can be as malleable in a documentary as any other art form. I learned that we insert ourselves in the stories we tell, our own sense and sensibilities holding up a mirror to reality. I was on my way.

Today, with a repository of films completed, I have been diagnosed with and treated for a life-threatening illness. Here, in this existential moment I found a place where I could make at least one film every night…in my dreams. Herein lies my password, secret incantation and inspiration as a filmmaker: my newest film State of Grace (2020) is my first attempt at capturing the essence of a single dream and its surreal quality.

I am collaborating with poet Michelle Valledares to edit a compilation of dream journals that I’ve kept over the last 30 years, a “Book of Dreams” that I hope may one day be published. The collection of short poetic films that I now propose will find their genesis in that source. In these films I expect to draw images and text from my dreams and incorporate unused and repurposed footage from my past films, materials in my personal archives, photographs and found material photographs, some evoking the past, others the present. My next film experiment, then, is a collection of dream messages.