Mauricio Angel/ Reform Agency
Tuesday, January 24, 2023 | 06:38
CDMX.- The portrait of a Mexican home, which allows you to take an intimate look at daily life, will be shown by the filmmaker Lila Avilés in her new film Totem, in the official competition of the Berlin Film Festival.
The film by the director laureate for La Camarista is the only Latin American that aspires to the Golden Bear, where she sought to extend to more characters the depth that she gave to the protagonist of her debut film.
“It was very important to understand the concept of home and how we inhabit the house as a space, but also the interaction between human beings. There is always a stream of diversity in families, especially in Mexican or Latin American families,” the filmmaker remarked in an interview .
“I was very interested in generating this diversity in the family, in friends, but above all I wanted to gestate, polish, push, bake, sculpt a female character from childhood. That’s why I wanted this seven-year-old girl to have that great curiosity, perception and very particular imagination towards life”.
The plot focuses on Sol (Naíma Sentíes), who is at her grandfather’s house to help prepare a party for her father, although in the process the family will be shaken by chaos.
Her process to reach her second feature film was nourished both by reflections on her childhood, which connected her both with her inner child and with the one she would have liked to be, as well as by her experiences as a mother.
“Having been a young mother, a virtue in my path as a filmmaker is that for me the exercise of directing is very similar to being a mother. In the end it is about guiding, caring, giving someone the knowledge, pushing, but not push, with great care and respect,” he explained.
When comparing the experience she has had with her two films, Avilés considers that the second one has approached it with more confidence and with the certainty that her place is the cinema, where she also seeks to tell stories without being pigeonholed or limited in themes.
“I hate labels, it’s as if because you are a woman you have to fulfill concepts and (what you do) is a ‘women’s film’. Sometimes there is that concept that for it to be a Latin American or Mexican film, it is violent, when Mexico is a very complex country.
“Something that I really liked about La Camarista is that it was a Mexican film, but it could be in Mexico or anywhere in the world; the virtue of Tótem is that it has that quality. I am very interested in finding that universality, that the labels are shade, dilute and unite”, concluded the filmmaker.
