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“The Process is the Only Part of Cinema That's Ours”: Elisa Miller Presents BITÁCORA DE DIRECCIÓN DE TEMPORADA DE HURACANES

Sofía Alvarado

Director Elisa Miller presented Bitácora de dirección de Temporada de huracanes (2025), a work made in collaboration with the UNAM Film Archive and Cátedra Bergman. 

Durig the presentation, the director and screenwriter of Temporada de huracanes (2023) talked about the importance of the creative process when working on a cinematographic work: “The process is the only part of cinema that is ours, not the result.”

She added that no process is linear, or easy, and the record that remains in the log reflects this, which is a work of digestion of the novel of the same name by Fernanda Melchor.

The work of a director is what she calls “the pre of questions”, since the films are made before reaching pre-production to answer all the doubts of the work team.

She shared that she creates archives without realizing it, “I am a note hoarder.” These little documents bring about small internal processes that help her digest the screenplay she is creating or adapting.

This book is the final part of that hard work and a way to see all the documentation that was done before the development of the film in order; The work of Isabel Toledo (coordinator of the Bergman Chair) and Hugo Villa Smythe (general director of Cinematographic Activities at UNAM) portrayed “the process I did of going from the book to the film, the symbolic journey of making a film.”

She also talked about how texts from her own process, which was very difficult and long, sneak into the book. This helps close the symbolic circle in the work of adapting the novel to a screenplay, a process that required six versions before it could sustain the structure of the original text.

The director, who studied Literature at the UNAM, explained that there are things that are untranslatable to cinema, that adapting Temporada de huracanes, by Fernanda Melchor, required, in some ways, for her to remove the literary aspect of the novel. A process that was both painful and joyful, since what she liked most about the book was the way it was written.

Finally, she explained that adapting a book to film is about “discarding and letting go” based on the principle that they are different languages. While literature relies on the reader's imagination and has no limits, in audiovisual language, it helps to limit the story.