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"With Nudo Mixteco I Realized My Characters Had Room to Decide Their Destiny": Ángeles Cruz

Gustavo R. Gallardo

Nudo mixteco (2021), by filmmaker and screenwriter Ángeles Cruz, was presented at the 19th Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) in the Mexican Feature Film Section.

The film addresses three stories of women who come together in the patronal feast of a town in the Mixteca Region of Oaxaca: María returns to bury her mother, but her father throws her out of the wake. Hurt, she asks her childhood love Piedad to run away with her; Chabela is put on trial before the Community Assembly by her husband, who after returning from the United States, finds that she's moved on with another man; and Toña, who relives the pain of the abuse she suffered in the past as her daughter goes through it.

"I started writing three monologues about women," director Ángeles Cruz says, "I thought they were a story about return, about how you return to your community and, when I finished writing the script, I realized that it was something else, I realized that my characters had a little room to decide their destiny, to make decisions about their bodies that they had never made before," she explained to film critic Alonso Díaz de la Vega.

For Cruz, what intertwines the three protagonists is the community that celebrates a patronal feast, the Community Assembly and the burial; "meeting points where the entire population converges."

"It is a very personal story, I always say that it is not that it happens to me, but I take it to heart and continue talking about what happens behind our doors," says the filmmaker, who describes herself as a very critical woman with everything that happens in the original communities, which she demonstrates in Nudo mixteco.

"We still carry a lot of machismo, a lot of misogyny, women are pushing certain changes, but it has not yet been enough. For me, cinema has become the place where I can ask these types of questions and find when it comes to screening them in my community, many answers and dialogue," she emphasized.

Producer Lucía Carreras said that many people from the Oaxacan community participated in the film in front of and behind the cameras, "it was not just the possibility of making a film, but also of learning things about the culture that I did not know and realizing that Mexico is diverse, and the value of these uses and customs. "

Finally, director Ángeles Cruz assured that filming was done with "absolute freedom" within the community: "She has never imposed on me or told me how to deal with a subject or not. In that sense, I hope that with Nudo mixteco, we can speak openly and always face to face. "