MacArthur Foundation Fellow: Natalia Almada, Mexican American “genius”

By Susana G. Baumann, Voxxi

A genius is someone whose unparalleled intellectual ability and creativity has allowed them to understand the inner nature of things and reach mastery in their activity or discipline. For Natalia Almada, a 2012 MacArthur Foundation ‘genius grant’ winner, it is the recognition of her mastery to push boundaries in documentary filmmaking while addressing social issues that are close to her heart. She is also the first Mexican American to receive such an award.

A dual citizen of Mexico and the United States, Almada is more a storyteller than just someone who informs about issues. She uses her camera to relate images and people she encounters in her discovery journey, as if those characters and places were just coming to her instead of her going after them, in the eyes of a bicultural observer.

She was born in Sinaola, Mexico, from a Mexican father and an American mother. Her first short film All Water Has a Perfect Memory (2001) is a racconto of memories, photographs and home videos about her sister Ana Lynn’s life and death in a drowning accident in their childhood home in Mexico. The film exposes her parents’ different cultural and gender perspectives in the face of this tragedy.

Almada’s bicultural viewpoint was also marked by her divided childhood between rural Mexico and “Say no to Drugs” Chicago. While in Sinaola, she came in contact with many of her second feature film’s characters, Al Otro Lado (2005), a gallery of border and rural landscapes’ natives, in a world of borders being crossed in more than the physical sense, and the reasons behind it.

Aldana’s  characters are confronted with life changing options, none of which are ideal, and their decisions will mark their destiny. The film is chronicled in corrido style, a song genre that features oppression, popular history and other socially important narratives.

Winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s US Directing Award for documentary, “El General” (2009) portrays the life of Natalia Almada’s family strongly tied to a notorious period of Mexican history and the life of her great-grandfather, General Plutarco Elías Calles.

Calles, a controversial figure also known as “el dictador” (dictator), “el bolchevique,” (bolshevik) and other strong epithets alike, became President of Mexico in 1924. The film presents audio recounts of Almada’s grandmother, Alicia Calles, photographs, historical newsreels, and old Hollywood films as a contraposition to present-day images of modern Mexico City and interviews with members of the Mexican working-class. The documentary portrays this double gaze at her family and her country’s history, painfully connected.

Another look at violence is offered in Almada’s latest film, “El Velador” (2011), an ordinary guardian of a non-ordinary cemetery where Mexico’s most infamous drug lords are buried. The documentary shows a parade of characters related to the buried personages, from widows to enemies to laborers, which constitutes a microcosm where violence opposes non-violence, and life opposes death.

Almada graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in Photography in 2001. However, fascination for the moving image prevailed in her work while allowing her to use other tools including essays, audios, historical archives and photography.

Her films have been said to pose more questions than answers. Natalia Almada reaffirms the strength of documentary filmmaking both as an art and a tool to remind us of the often ignored implications of social conflict.

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Susana G. Baumann is a writer, editor, and blogger for all topics related to Latinos, Hispanics and Latinoamericans.