"This moment of our cinema lacks rebellion": Natalia López Gallardo

It is a film about the psychological dimension of something that concerns us all. Mantle of gems is also an experience that is lived with the body”.

Natalia López Gallardo, Mexican filmmaker.

The philosopher Judith Butler says that the body is a field where political and social relations interact. Broadly speaking, she proposes that the generalized assimilation of the body is a social construction that legitimizes binarisms and makes them the ideal pretext for violent disputes over gender. The body is, therefore, terrain and the center of dispute.

Today, the collectivization of work, of art, of activism, seeks, among many other triggers, the generic dissolution of what is created or worked on, seeks to break with vertical and binary hegemonies and proposes new orders of thought.

Cinema is no stranger to this new vision of artistic work. One of the films in which this emphasis is placed is the award-winning fiction Manto de gemas, the debut film by Natalia López Gallardo, winner of the Silver Bear, Jury Award, in the 2022 edition of the Berlinale, which will finally comply with his cycle, to meet the Mexican public at its premiere in commercial theaters this Thursday, March 9, within the framework of activities for International Women’s Day.

And it is that Manto de gemas is a collective story, mainly female, with three women in the foreground who intertwine their lives on a path of redemption, resistance and struggle, where violence is not explicit, but it is latent, a wound that we all carry. , we normalize or with which we even mimic ourselves.

Isabel (Nailea Norvind), in the process of divorce and moving, finds out that María (Antonia Olivares), who has been a domestic employee for her family, is looking for her missing sister, so Isabel decides to join her in the search, while Commander Roberta (Aída Roa), not only deals with organized crime and the disappearances of women in the region, but also has to persuade her son to abandon his fascination with the narco lifestyle. It is a story of wills and sorority, but also where the victims will become the perpetrators.

is filmed with the body

“It gives me peace to think that the film cycle is finally coming to an end”, declares López Gallardo. “It is a film about the psychological dimension of something that concerns us all. Mantle of gems is also an experience that is lived with the body. Now there are great thinkers talking about the body not as an identity but as a ‘somatheque’, as the queer theorist Paul B. Preciado puts it. At the time he was doing the interviews with the mothers of disappeared persons and with people who had had contact with kidnappings and violence, I felt totally unable to embody that body, for fear of not being able to get closer to the dimension of pain that this tragedy has brought us and not being able to transmit it, until I realized that it was not necessary to embody those other bodies, you just had to recognize the wound that we all had, and that was my starting point.

“I realized that this had to be a film about the collective, about a fabric and about the wound that we share in the face of a violence that is not that of the bullets or the pornography to which we are exposed every day and from which we are immunized. , but one that runs below the surface, that is behind the walls of our house and that we can only see through a process of identification with the other”.

There is a standardized cinema

He is asked his opinion on an industry where the line between the apology of crime and violence is blurred, and he is embraced as a guaranteed alternative to entertainment.

López Gallardo responds: “When I talk about political or ideological ties, I do it from the possibility of reinventing oneself. I think that this moment in our cinema lacks rebellion. The types of cinema you mention respond to a consumer capitalism that standardizes the stories. Those tapes have to be perfectly understood within a particular time, for a very short attention span, where everything has to be understood and liked by an 84-year-old lady and a 13-year-old teenager at the same time. And all this continues to respond to a kind of conservatism.

Regarding the exhibition opportunity, what the union points out as the great Achilles heel, the director concludes:

“Making movies implies many things, there is a lot of money behind it, clearly this is an industry. The cinema has these faces and, of course, you have to position yourself before them for a film to be powerful. If it has to be a commercial manifestation and that is its purpose, then let it be a pure and brilliant purpose. We are in a time of crisis, of transformation and you have to be coherent, know that transformation always takes you to another port, and you have to start visualizing that port collectively”.