MEXICO CITY — As a young girl growing up in 1980s Mexico, the idea of becoming a filmmaker was almost unimaginable to Fernanda Valadez. Other than a film club at the local university, there were no movie theaters in her hometown, Guanajuato, and films made by women were scarce.
“The dream of making cinema was something far away,” she recently recalled. “We grew up feeling that making movies was very difficult.”
However, some 30 years later, that dream has become very real. Valadez’s debut film, “Identifying Features,” took home two top awards at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and this year’s awards include Best Picture, Director and Screenplay at the Ariel Awards, the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars.
After decades of competing for recognition in a male-dominated industry, female filmmakers like Valadez are setting Mexican cinema on fire not only to release more work, but also to garner the critical success and major accolades that have long been reserved for their male peers.
In a society where machismo has often held back women and gender-based violence is commonplace, the rise and recognition of female filmmakers reflects a broader social change brought about by both an emboldened feminist movement in Mexico and an urgent conversation about sexism worldwide.
“It’s been years in the making,” Valadez said. “But I’m very happy to be part of a generation of women who tell powerful stories.”
It was not easy getting here, neither for Valadez nor for her fellow filmmakers.
Tatiana Huezo is a Salvadoran-Mexican director, who in 2017 became the first woman to win the directorial award with the Ariels. Her latest film, ‘Prayers for the Stolen’, which received a special mention at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is Mexico’s nominee for the best international Oscar for the 2022 Academy Awards, and was shortlisted for finalists last week. for the figurine. If nominated, Huezo would become the first Mexican woman to compete for the award, even though compatriots like Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro have dominated the top prizes lately.
When Huezo was a little girl, her mother snuck her into the cinema to see arthouse movies. The director remembers that he was enchanted and sometimes scared by the films of David Lynch and François Truffaut. But when she started studying at Mexico’s Film Training Center, she was confronted with sexism.
Huezo had signed up to be a cameraman, but once in school, male directors didn’t want to include her in their projects, so she had to shoot and direct her own film.
“They would say ‘it’s too hard with the cameras,'” she said.
Valadez encountered similar obstacles at the Film Training Center, where she was one of only four women in a class of 15. She said some female students at film schools were being asked inappropriately, such as whether they would have children or would they be able to wear gear.
“We women face more filters,” she said. “Men in these generations have been brought up to believe that fate is in their hands.”
Sexism has long been a problem in Mexican film schools, said Maricarmen de Lara, a feminist filmmaker and professor who served as director of the film school at the National Autonomous University of Mexico from 2015 to 2019.
The industry was even worse when she was a young student, with sets ruled by men. “It was men who downplayed the work of women, and they did it in public,” Lara said, adding that a few were violent. “There were some cinematographers who wouldn’t even accept a female assistant photographer.”
But women have managed to make films in the country for decades, said Arantxa Luna, the critic and screenwriter, pointing to Adela Sequeyro, who worked as a producer and director in the 1930s, and María Novaro, who co-starred with Lara. from the feminist collective Cine Mujer in the 1970s and 1980s.
The legacy of the feminist film movement is especially enduring for Mexican documentaries: Between 2010 and 2020, women directed a third of documentaries in the country, compared to just 16 percent of fiction films.
Still, it has been an uphill battle.
“Fifteen, twenty years ago, there weren’t that many female directors in Mexico,” says documentary maker Natalia Almada, who won a Sundance directorial award in 2009. “Even being a woman in the field with a camera making movies meant something.”
Off-camera, women have had an impact beyond directing. Behind some of Mexico’s most prominent male filmmakers of the past 20 years are also producers such as Bertha Navarro, whose credits include several of Guillermo del Toro’s most acclaimed films, and Mónica Lozano Serrano, who was an associate producer of Alejandro González Iñarritu’s “Amores”. Perros.” Lozano, the former president of the Mexican Film Academy, has championed public funding for cinema in Mexico in recent years.
Meanwhile, the Hollywood success of Iñarritu, Cuarón and del Toro, nicknamed ‘the three amigos’” also helped the industry in Mexico, which has seen a surge in attention and money for film. Almada said they took “a sort of international look at Mexico as a place where interesting work is made.”
The result is an avalanche of Mexican cinema and a corresponding rise in the number of films made by women. In 2000, “Amores Perros” was one of only 28 Mexican feature films; in 2019, according to official figures, there were more than 200. In 2008, only five films were directed by women, in 2018 that number had risen to 47.
Filmmaking grew as society evolved. An emboldened feminist movement has increasingly taken to the streets in Mexico demanding an end to gender-based violence, and the #MeToo movement has sprung up as well.
Valadez said the cultural shift caused by the #MeToo movement became apparent at the reception of her previous project, “The Darkest Days of Us” (2017), the story of a woman haunted by her sister’s death, directed by Valadez’ production partner, Astrid Rondero.
“Before #MeToo went viral, when we were still editing, there were comments that the film even felt aggressive towards men,” she said. After the movement exploded, Valadez said, “it started to understand that it was a movie that talked about what #MeToo brought to the table, the micro-aggressions, the violence, the abuse.”
The changes initiated by #MeToo are being felt in Mexico’s film industry. In September, the #YaEsHora (It’s Time) activist group, in partnership with the Boston Center for Latin America and eight Mexican production companies, launched the country’s first “Comprehensive Harassment Protocol,” a set of procedures and regulations to prevent sexual abuse in the film industry.
Meanwhile, the Film Training Center, where both Valadez and Huezo studied, announced that early this year, half of the seats in the main courses would be reserved for women.
Still, there is still a lot of work to be done, say directors. Of the more than 100 Mexican feature films produced in 2020, when the industry was hit by the pandemic, 17 percent were directed by women, down from 20 percent the year before and 25 percent in 2018.
“There’s still a long way to go — it’s not quite right yet,” Huezo said. “And I hope we get there, because it’s going to enrich cinema so much.”