One of the major new voices in contemporary Latin American (and world) cinema, the young Mexican Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda has emerged in the past year from seemingly out of nowhere to be feted with career retrospectives, festival screenings, and glowing critical praise. Rarely does a body of work epitomize the key elements of contemporary cinema-long, quiet takes; the blend of documentary and fiction; the use of nonactors; etc.-while also forging something strikingly original, inspired as much by Pereda's fascination with silence, movement, and place as it is by current aesthetics.
Although compared to Pedro Costa and Lisandro Alonso for his attention to setting and atmosphere, and to Tsai Ming-liang and Aki Kaürismaki for a deadpan humor, Pereda seems most interested in using cinema to evoke a physical sense of place-in this case, modern Mexico. “My concern is to understand and ultimately to evoke the experience of the everyday, and to convey through film-albeit a visual medium-a physical and intangible sense of feelings, place, and culture,” he writes. Uncluttered with needless dramatics or plot pyrotechnics, focused on the patterns of everyday life, his films indeed focus not on how a story is told, but how it is lived.
We are delighted that film critic Robert Koehler will be in conversation with Pereda following our screening of Pereda's first film, Where Are Their Stories? on Sunday, December 4. Koehler will also introduce Together on Friday, December 2. He writes extensively on cinema, including for Variety, Cinema Scope, Cineaste, Film Journey, MUBI, and the LA Weekly.