Alejandra Marquez Abella’s Northern Skies Over Empty Space.

Interview with Alejandra Marquez Abella’s Northen Skies Over Empty Space.

by Rita Di Santo

After directing an episode of Narcos for Netflix, and a future film, female Mexican director Alejandra Márquez Abella boldly confronts macho culture and the Western genre in her new film Northern Skies Over Empty Space.

The story centers on Don Reynaldo’s ranch as it celebrates its anniversary, and a gang arrives to demand money to Don Reynaldo.

Told from the point of view of characters usually side-lined, Márquez Abella portrays an epochal shift in rural Mexico.

I meet Alejandra at the Berlinale Film festival, an elegant young lady with lots to say. “My movies are about class inequality. My last film was The Good Girls, which was a film about rich women in a very rich neighbourhood in Mexico, in the '80s. This is a very different film, but it is connected because it deals with class subjects as well gender inequality. And this was a different way to speak about those objects. Is the movie based on real events? It is inspired by a real story that happened 10 years ago in Mexico. It is a very common story in Mexican history, and it's a very common story in Westerns. I wanted to tell this story, because I feel it is fundamental for the building of the masculine identity, having to defend and be heroic and courageous.

Are the hunting sequences at the beginning of the movie announcing the theme of masculinity? Exactly, it is being powerful over some someone else, having power of life or death. The power is with the man and women are kept to one side.

It is about men having power over women and women sort of holding it all together, but it is still about men and anthropocentrism, about men being over everything, everyone, every other living thing, not just the women, but the animals and yeah, being unable to see the other in their eyes. The movie shows also a very clear class system, we can see that the movie is set in modern time because of the hand luggage and cars, but in a way the class system, where workers are stuck in their role and the owner, the rich, who want to raise more money. It is a very common story in Mexico. We have a huge social inequality, but I think in the film what happens is that every relationship becomes horizontal at the end because we're all the same. We're all together in the same planet and we're fighting for the same things. The animals, the workers, everyone becomes equal, because we're all dust. You portray a no man's land. There is no law, no institutions present, like a Western. Can you please tell me something about this? Mexico has a big justice problem. It's difficult to bring criminals to justice in Mexico. We're stuck in a violent cycle, and we just recognize the obvious and evident violence, which is a criminal violence, but we don't see the many layers of violence that live in our daily lives. We raise our kids in a very violent way, as you can see in the film, the way we bring food to our table is a very violent way as well. Everything is violent. So, if we can't just recognize that violence in Mexico, we're going to just keep perpetuating violence, which is in the papers and in the news every day. How do you feel as a female director to talk about macho culture? It was interesting because my crew was full of women. A lot of heads of department were female. I used to say we were observing men as women and just put them in a different place. Just to try to portray in a different way from how they display their power. The family is a microcosm of Mexican society. You have the woman that decide to have children, the intellectual woman with the computer, the woman worker that accept her lower class position. The woman mother, just making children. How is the awareness of gender equality in your country? We are a very traditional society, strong Catholics. Women usually play a role. They nurture, they are therapists, you know, they must deal with the emotional, but also with nurturing everyone, and maintaining things. But I would say that the biggest burden is the emotional burden. I think Mexican women carry that on their backs because a lot of men can't have a relationship with their feelings. That's a big thing, it changes throughout families, but I would say that the Mexican woman is a woman very dedicated to her family and her cooking and that's it.

And what about the institutions, because we don't see any police, anybody representing the government? What is the government? What is the power of the government? We were shooting this film in the Maurepas, which is a very violent place in Mexico. It has been a very violent place for many, many years. And the experience of shooting there to me was very revealing because you didn't know who the good guy was or who was the bad guy. You didn't know if the police were the bad guys or the good guys, so you can't trust anyone, and you must build through getting to know people and building relationships. There is no law and, in the film, they speak about the military, that they may have this help, but it's not clear that there's someone who can help them. Something about the animals in the movies, there are lots of them?

I live in Mexico City and my neighbourhood is normal, I go to the supermarket, I get my food there, but these people have to breed pigs, goats, and that's their food. The relationship that they have with the animals is very different from what I expected. I got there and had this hippy poor animals’ thing. And I had to learn what that's about there because it's not the same thing for me. Not because I go to the supermarket, and everything is there, and you just buy the things. I started laughing and saying that this was a vegan Western. I just wonder if there is a hypocritical attitude from the big city because I have friends in Mexico City and it's a completely different place and I didn't know that this kind of ranch exists. I just wanted to know the relation between the city, the big city, and the Southern kind of gravity. Something about this style? I wanted to portray a concept they call it the ‘book fever,’ which is when you're about to shoot something. Of course, I learned this from hunters when they're about to shoot, they go into this state that's called the book fever. It is sort of an emotional place, and they shoot, then it's over. But this is a huge thing for them. We were discussing with a photographer, Claudia, how could we capture that emotional moment. Because you're about to make some things stop living, you're going to kill something. And so we came with this idea of putting this piece of glass in front of the camera because. It was not about seeing things but being in the place of the hunter and the hunted and that relationship, being in there. Something about the look of the criminals? The criminals are disgusting. They are ugly. Bebo, who is the guy with a scar was our scouter. He was perfect and he has been raised in ranches and so he knows that kind of life, it was fun to bring him in to them. And he was always telling me because he's from that song and he was always telling me I'm going to die in a shooting someday. This was his actual real fantasy. And I told him, well, I'm going to kill you in fiction so that you don't have to die in real life. I'm going to shoot you in fiction so that you have your scene and then you don't have to look for that in real life.

And your next project? I have a couple of projects now. It's a series. And then I have a film as well, which is the trip that my grandparents had. They migrated to Chicago in the '70s and they had a whole new life there. I'm working on that.