Where Are Their Stories?

A rising star of contemporary Mexican cinema, Nicolás Pereda (b. 1982) is a central figure in a diverse group of Ibero-American directors whose innovative approaches to narrative filmmaking over the last ten years have together defined one of the most exciting trends in world cinema. Pereda’s films are resolutely Mexican in focus and almost exclusively deal with stories drawn directly from the everyday lives and worlds of their working-class characters. Yet the careful, often enigmatic minimalism embraced by Pereda’s films – equally through their fractured and elliptical narratives as their preference for extended sequence shots – is best understood in the context of similarly ambitious filmmaking practices explored by influential artists such as Portugal’s Pedro Costa and Argentina’s Lisandro Alonso. Indeed, like Costa’s pioneering trilogy of films set in Lisbon’s Fontainhas district and featuring a cast of non-professional actors drawn from its inhabitants, Pereda’s work intertwines elements of narrative and documentary cinema to radically confuse and reinvigorate the traditional categories of fiction and non-fiction. This aspect of Pereda’s cinema is perhaps best exemplified in his haunting short film Interview With the Earth, which subtly approaches the story of a young boy’s accidental death from a series of oblique angles, combining interviews with the boy’s friends, their almost ritualistic return to the mountain site of his fatal accident and the efforts of their mother to make amends for the tragedy. A melancholy meditation on death, ceremony and childhood imagination, Interview’s melding of abstract imagery with documentary-style interviews casts a mysterious spell upon the film, an uncertainty whether its story is “true” or a scripted creation.

In a similar manner as Lisandro Alonso, Pereda has refined a meticulously controlled aesthetic that lends his films an austere, enigmatic beauty and gives their stories a ritualistic quality and resonance. The stylistic restraint of Pereda’s films extends from his careful refusal of any elaborate or ostentatious cinematic effects to their stripped down, fable-like stories and the notably subdued performances of his actors. Refusing the long dominant narrative tradition of characters whose motivations are clearly explained through “back stories," Pereda’s films instead center around carefully modulated performances in which gestures and bodies “speak” more clearly than words. Restricting dialogue to an absolute minimum, Pereda’s films follow simple, almost stark, stories focused less upon actions than their effects and featuring recurrent characters played with laconic reserve by performers from Pereda’s stock company of regulars, most notably Teresa Sanchez and Gabino Rodríguez who appear as mother and son in three of the films. These three features – Together, Perpetuum Mobile and Summer of Goliath – are, in fact, subtly inter-nested to offer a shared portrait, cumulatively building in detail, of difficult lives in 21st century working class Mexico. Rejecting dialogue-driven drama, Pereda’s deeply nuanced films demand and reward a more patient and engaged mode of spectatorship attentive to the emotions and meaning contained with the smallest gestures of his actors, and floating between the elliptical stories that always seem to be fragments of a larger unfinished film. —Harvard Film Archive