le dossier de presse

EL VELADOR
(THE NIGHT WATCHMAN)
A FILM BY NATALIA ALMADA
EL VELADOR
A FILM BY NATALIA ALMADA
SYNOPSIS
From dusk to dawn EL VELADOR accompanies Martin, the
guardian angel who, night after night, watches over the
extravagant mausoleums of Mexico's most notorious Drug Lords.
In the labyrinth of the narco-cemetery, this film about violence
without violence reminds us how, in the turmoil of Mexico's
bloodiest conflict since the Revolution, ordinary life persists and
quietly defies the dead.
PREMIERE
72 / 52 minutes - HD - 2011 - Mexico / USA
US PREMIERE:
NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS
EUROPEAN PREMIERE:
CANNES 2011: The Directors’ Fortnight
BROADCAST
Upcoming national broadcast in 2012 on
PBS’ award-winning program POV.
To download press kit/high resolution stills please go to www.altamurafilms.com
CREDITS
Director/Producer/DP/Editor: Natalia Almada
Associate Producers: Laurence Ansquer, Tita Productions
Charlotte Uzu, Les FIlms d'Ici
Sound Designer: Alejandro de Icaza
Co-editor: Julien Devaux
Production Assistant: Ramiro Rodriguez
EL VELADOR is a co-production of Altamura Films and American Documentary
| POV in association with Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB), with funding
provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Additional funding
provided by the Jan Vrijman Fund, The Sundance Institute Documentary Fund,
Charles Schultz, NYSCA and Chicken and Egg Pictures.
Fiscal sponsor: Women Make Movies
CONTACT
Natalia Almada
Altamura Films
+1 347 288 838
+52 1 55 3901 6528
[email protected]
Laurence Ansquer
Tita Production
+33 4 91 33 44 62
[email protected]
Charlotte Uzu
Les Films d’Ici
+33 1 44 52 23 29
[email protected]
Cynthia Lopez
POV
+1 212-989-8121
[email protected]
Carlos Gutiérrez (Press)
Cinema Tropical
212-254-5475
[email protected]
FILM DESCRIPTION
Martin, the night watchman, arrives with the setting sun in his rumbling blue
Chevrolet. The cemetery mascots, EI Negro y La Negra, chase his truck down
the road and greet him with wagging tails. The sound of construction fades
away as the daytime workers leave and Martin is left alone, looking out over the
skyline of mausoleums where Mexico's most notorious drug lords lie at rest.
Crosses and steel construction bars pierce the purple and pink sky. As night
descends luxurious cars fill the dirt roads. Mercedes, a sexy young widow,
arrives with her little girl in a pristine white Audi. A portrait of her husband, a
corrupt policeman holding a machine gun, watches over them as they sweep
and mop the shiny marble floors. The coconut vendor's radio blasts a gory list
of the day's murders: "Culiacán has become a war zone." The buzz of cicadas
fills the air with anticipation. Through Martin's vigilant eyes we watch time pass
in this place where time stands still.
A portrait of the daily life of the cemetery allows us to see the intersection
between those who make a living there and those who rest there – innocent or
guilty. A construction worker hovers over the grave plastering the inside of the
cupola while a young widow lights a candle to her recently killed husband.
Eventually mourning too becomes a kind of work as the widows return day
after day to tend to their husbands mausoleums, a perversely gaudy reminder
of the violence that is wounding Mexico, and of the socio-economic conditions
in which this violence flourishes. A worker covets the luxuries his wages will
never afford him as he hangs a chandelier. The women look too young to be
widows; the children play hop scotch on tombs the way others play in
sandboxes and on jungle gyms. The code of silence makes conversation
dangerous. The word "narco' is forbidden. The teetering scaffolding, the rotting
wooden ladder, the photograph of a man who died at 23: life is precarious for
everyone with business here.
EL VELADOR lingers at the threshold of violence. By refusing to show the
graphic images that the press feverishly disseminates Almada asks us to dwell in
the moment when violence has just left its mark and when violence is imminent.
Her camera enters into the intimate and ordinary routines of this world with
patience, restraint and tenderness.
EL VELADOR is a film about violence without violence.
BACKGROUND
EL VELADOR is set in a cemetery in Culiacan, capital of northern Sinaloa state
and drug heartland of Mexico. Since the war on drugs began, the number of
graves in the cemetery has exploded and the extravagance of the mausoleums
has exceeded the imaginable. Ranging in design from minimalist modernism to
fanciful imitations of magazine mosques, these opulent constructions are
narco-tombs, costing as much as 100,000 dollars. In Mexico's depressed
economy, who else can afford such luxuries, and who else dies so young, so
often? The cemetery is a private enterprise, not exclusively for drug traffickers,
but it is the most expensive in Culiacan. It requires dispensable income that very
few have.
Shortly after taking office President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug
cartels and put the military to the task of fighting the drug trade in Mexico. The
blood bath that has ensued has affected possibly every sector of our society
and invaded our daily lives. In 2009 over 8000 people died in violent incidents
related to drug trafficking. That same year the civilian death toll in Iraq was
approximately 4500. The illegal drug trade is a multi-billion dollar industry and it
has no borders. Drugs are produced, trafficked and consumed across the globe,
and billions circulate in the global economy. But it is Mexico that has become
the central battlefield of this worldwide problem. "There aren't enough living to
bury the dead" says the cemetery's director, who is losing the race to keep up
with the dying. It is estimated that approximately 35,000 people have been
killed since December 2006.
FILMMAKER STATEMENT
I come from a ranching family and spent a lot of time growing up in Sinaloa,
which is now Mexico’s most productive agricultural state, and which stories about the constant run-ins with the “narcos” that was part of daily life in
Sinaloa are countless, and all had a Godfather quality about them. But when the
cowboy I’d known my whole life told us his son had disappeared and the
remains of his seven buddies where found burned alive, the violence of the drug
trade stopped having that Hollywood flare. The ranch caretaker was tortured
and beaten so badly he couldn’t tell the story of what had happened to him
without wetting his pants and so he never told the authorities. Reality no longer
felt ‘like a movie” and I felt the need to make a film.
In the past few years when I travel outside of Mexico, people often ask me, “why
is there so much violence in Mexico?” “What is the solution to the violence?” I
noticed however that they usually ask as they are getting up from the table, not
as they are sitting down to engage in a meaningful conversation about the
matter. It is the issue that puts Mexico on the cover of the NY Times and yet it
seems to always remain beyond our grasp, perhaps as violence most often
does. We look at a photo in the paper and wonder, “how could someone do
that” and feel a sense of relief that it happens over there, far from here. It seems
impossible to imagine that someone's normal life continues in the midst of such
atrocities. In the question of how to look at violence I believe lies some
necessary insight to understand violence.
When I am shooting I often think of a Baudelaire quote that I read in Barthes’
“Camera Lucida:” “The emphatic truth of gesture in the great circumstances of
life.” If film has any relationship to truth (which I’m not convinced it does) it
must lie in its ability to film gestures. I thought that filming at the cemetery I
might be able to understand the violence that is pointlessly destroying our
country. Over the course of a year shooting there, I realized that it is not only
understanding that I seek through the lens but to rescue the sense of humanity
that violence kills. Or, as Serge Daney so beautifully wrote, “to touch with the
gaze that distance between myself and where the other exists.”
PAUPERS’ CEMETERY, ARIZONA
CEMETERY, CULIACAN
When I went to the cemetery in July 2009, I immediately recalled the paupers'
cemetery where I shot part of AI Otro Lado, a few miles north of the border in
Arizona. That cemetery was full of unidentified illegal immigrants who had died
crossing the desert. Their "American Dream" came to fruition in a desolate
empty lot of dirt, under a brick inscribed with their new American names, Jane
and John Doe. The rows of bricks were a site of utter anonymity and oblivion. I
understood that the surreal skyline of mausoleums was its antithesis, a grand
expression of remembrance, a refusal to be invisible, anonymous and forgotten.
Yet both are products of the same social inequalities, and the same
that those with the ability to pay for mausoleums have made themselves
economically indispensable, with a multi-billion dollar industry that makes the
news through violence, and marks its memory with rich tombs. When I began
filming, four massive mausoleums were in mid construction and a new hole had
been excavated for 300 more graves. By the time I finished shooting that hole
had been filled with young bodies and a tractor was digging out a new hole.
The continuing growth of the cemetery reflects the continuing failure to end the
violence that has already claimed over 35,000 lives.
http://www.elbravomatamoros.com/pm/noticias.aspx?seccion=19&noticia=189830
In December 2009, after the assassination of Beltran Leyva, "EI Jefe de Jefes," a
decapitated head was left on his tomb. I thought it was a threat. Later it was
explained to me that it was in fact an offering. Hence, the red gerbera daisy
placed behind the left ear of the bloodied head: the detail stood out brilliantly
against the write marble in the photograph that inevitably circulated in the
"nota roja" and on the web.
What are we to make of these images? Are they like the Abu Ghraib
photographs? Like trophies of war? The lynching photographs of slaves in
southern United States? Or the photographs of the religious hung along the
train tracks in Mexico's Cristiada war? In her essay about the Abu Ghraib
photographs, "Regarding the Torture of Others," Susan Sontag writes, "The
horror of what is shown in the photographs cannot be separated from the
horror that the photographs were taken." Perhaps the person who left the head
on the tomb was not the one to take the photograph, but when he placed the
gerbera behind the left ear, he most certainly knew a photograph would be
taken; and knew, moreover, the more shocking the sight, the more likely it would
be to circulate far and wide. He undoubtedly took pleasure in posing the head
just so. We have taken the bait, and have stared with fascination at the
grotesqueness of it all. Then we were afraid. And then we walked away.
After a year of filming at the cemetery, I arrived one morning unannounced at
7:00 AM, as usual, to catch the sun rising behind the mausoleums and the
arrival of the construction workers. Shortly after setting up my tripod in front of
the first burial in the new hole, I was informed that I had to leave, and it was
very clear to me it was to be taken seriously. I have always been able to talk my
way out of or into situations, but this time there was nothing to say, because
there was no one to say it to, only the messenger. That early July morning I felt
an invisible and therefore omnipresent power over me. The media had shown
me again and again in minute detail what El Narco is capable of doing. This
time, the threat implied, to me. It is this perfect combination of invisibility and
visibility that makes the rest of us powerless. And once the morbid
sensationalism of the photos of the decapitated, burned and executed fades
away, all we are left with is fear and a desperate feeling of impotence and
numbness. By refusing to show these graphic images, I propose that we take an
unflinching look at violence.
NATALIA ALMADA BIO
Recipient of the 2009 Sundance Documentary Directing Award for her film “El
General,” Almada’s most recent film “El Velador” is a haunting look at violence
through the eyes of the night watchman of Mexico’s most notorious
narco-cemetery. Her previous credits include “All Water Has a Perfect Memory,”
an experimental short film that received international recognition; “Al Otro
Lado,” her award-winning debut feature documentary about immigration, drug
trafficking and corrido music. Almada’s films have screened at The Sundance
Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum and The
Whitney Biennial. Her three feature documentaries broadcast on the
award-winning series POV. Almada is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a 2008
Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2010 USA Artist Fellow. She graduated with a
Masters in Fine Arts in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design
and shares her time between Mexico City and Brooklyn, New York.