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Seeing Beyond Memories: Interview with Vania Quevedo and Omar Lara on MI SANGRE ES PETRÓLEO

There comes a time in life when we look back to try to understand the past and, perhaps, to heal some of its wounds. To bring those memories to cinema is to embark on a journey of personal exploration, while also gaining the possibility of viewing them from another perspective. In Mi sangre es petróleo, the director Vania Quevedo revisits her family’s past to explore how memory, absence, and the enduring legacy of oil work intertwine.

At the 24th edition of the Morelia International Film Festival, director Vania Quevedo and producer Omar Lara shared their process of making the documentary, the creative decisions that shaped it, and the deeply personal story that inspired it.

FICM: Vania, when did you realize that this experience could become a documentary? What were you trying to understand or, perhaps, to bring back?

Vania Quevedo: It all started when I was about fifteen or sixteen. My family—especially my father—was chosen to star in an institutional video for the company Pemex, produced right before the boom in oil films known as Héroes de la Seguridad, or something like that.

I remember our house back then, filled with cameras and lights here and there. That was the first seed that planted in me the desire to study cinema, of wanting to make movies one day.

And, well, once that happened, I didn’t pursue a formal university degree, but I did attend several diploma programs. In Tabasco, a few diploma programs from a film school that existed back then—the Southeast Cinematographic Center—were being offered. And that seed was already there, born from the moment someone had filmed us as a family.

It hurt deeply to have a father who kept leaving and returning, a father who was never truly present. I also wanted to understand why my father was the way he was, and what living for so long on an oil platform had done to him internally.

That’s when I thought, “Well, it’s my turn now to tell my own story, to tell my family’s story.” That’s where it all began, when I started developing the project as part of the Master’s in Documentary Filmmaking I studied at the International Film and Television School [EICTV, by its acronym in Spanish, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión] in Cuba.

At the beginning, I wanted to make another kind of film, another kind of documentary, but my advisors told me it was important for me to be in the film and use my own voice, because every time I talked about it, they were moved and touched by the way I spoke about my father. At that time, I had an advisor who was a documentary filmmaker, and he was particularly interested in the project because he had already made a film about his mother.

Years later, I crossed paths with him at a film festival. He remembered the documentary I had been developing back in 2018, and I said, “Well, let’s give it a try.” However, it’s never easy to be in a film about your own story and narrate it in your own voice. It’s always like reopening a wound.

That’s when I began the journey of looking for funding and submitting the project to different development programs.

FICM: Omar, the film has a particular materiality—with textures and a sense of tangible object. How did you and Vania work together to build that visual and sensory dimension? Was it already conceived from the production stage?

Omar Lara: It was a deeply open conversation with Vania about her expectations, defined at first by the nature of the film stock itself—in this case, Super 8 mm and 16 mm—using different formats of the same footage captured by Vania throughout different stages of shooting.

Vania follows a beautiful shooting process that involves returning again and again—shooting, revising, editing—and creating a kind of dialogue with what is being recorded.

In that collaborative process, we realized that, given the nature of these different textures and formats, a multi-format approach suited the project perfectly—featuring different cameras: from Don Luis with his GoPro on the oil platform, to a range of visual strategies that echo the metaphors of oil and black gold—touching on the ideas of blood and the inherited legacy within Vania’s family.

We concluded—and I had the honor, for which I’m always grateful to Vania, for trusting me with the color work—that we would build this strategy between black and white, mainly in the 4:3 format, to evoke a sort of virtual confinement that operates as a metaphor within the platform and within the fleeting mark of abandonment—here, of the author, Vania, addressing her daughter as well.

There is a certain visual approach defined by Antolín Jiménez’s cinematography, by Vania’s own photographic direction, and by Don Luis’s images. In short, through a whole series of characters within the footage, we managed to create a cohesion that appeals to memory, but at the same time it’s something painfully current; something that, sadly, continues to operate.

Beyond the inherent nature of the metallic, the black, and the grays that come from this oil-induced madness—with its wild colors: violets, blues, turquoise—it was also about imagining color within these visual approaches.

FICM: Thinking about this part you mention regarding colors and their contrasts, Vania, you also show this contrast between the oil workers, their work, and the families who endure their absence. How did you shape that vision of work and the way it affects family bonds?

Vania Quevedo: I think it was closely tied to the way memory is built, to how I remember my childhood against what I imagined as well. Memory ends up being like a puzzle you have to put together and invent the missing pieces—especially taking into account that I was a child, around five years old.

My process was deeply connected with the recreation of my memory, with the search for archival materials, for the photographs from when my father started working on oil platforms at the age of seventeen or eighteen, always with his camera in hand. All those family treasures, the archival materials, I held on to them.

There’s this hybridization between the archival material, what I recreated with Super 8 and 16 mm, and what we have in the digital camera. That dialogue between past and present plays a major role.

That’s why I wanted to work with different cameras, textures and sensations. The GoPro was the solution to not knowing how to get a camera in there because, obviously, Pemex wasn’t going to let me film inside an oil platform.

I vividly remember that, during the Master’s in Alternative Cinema—after first studying Documentary and later returning to Alternative Cinema—the focus was on breaking the paradigms of how a documentary is supposed to be made. That’s where I learned that different formats and cameras can be hybridized.

In an ethnographic film workshop, they showed us a movie that changed my life and had a lot to do with the GoPro. It was Leviathan by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor.

My solution was that if I wanted to capture the inside of the platform, I’d have to do it differently. My father bought his GoPro and started bringing it along, just as he used to take his 35 mm camera. Once, I told him, “Start doing the same thing and we’ll see where it ends up getting tied.”

There are some very crazy shots where you can see the camera descending on one of the cranes inside the platform. I kept telling my father where to tie the camera so we could get those sensory shots.

FICM: This thing you mentioned about putting the puzzle together seems important to us. We wanted to ask you, Omar, how was it to work with the communities of Tabasco and to find the balance between Vania’s family story and the voices of those featured in the film?

Omar Lara: Well, yes. Thank you very much for asking. It’s worth noting that Vania is also one of the producers.

We made a strategy in which Vania was responsible for all the matters related to the shooting and the understanding of the community, with all the skills and competencies she has developed since her first short film, Marea, and other formative exercises.

Alongside her deep knowledge of the community, and together with Antolín Jiménez—the cinematographer, a Tabasco native and Vania’s childhood friend—we developed a strategy in which Paulina Villacencio—our other producer from Disruptiva Films—was dedicated to the general strategy of administrative, legal, and financial processes, and I was in charge of the whole post-production phase.

Even within this rupture of paradigms that Vania talks about—a result of her training at the Cuban film school, from which she graduated—we developed that ability to delegate and to understand that creative production extends far beyond a single stage.

Vania’s methodology involved several shooting stages: she would go, film, edit, review material, and we’d build screenings that culminated in Paulina Villacencio’s participation as editor together with Vania to shape the final cut. The approach was truly holistic.

Regarding the shooting process, Vania could share more about this feeling or the challenges faced along the way. I don’t know if you’d like to comment on that, Vania.

Vania Quevedo: In relation to the communities I portrayed, it was deeply connected to my personal search—to witness firsthand the consequences of oil in specific places.

I grew up thinking that oil was the greatest thing in the world, and when I saw how it impacts others—those who don’t even work in oil but do other kinds of work, I realized they too are victims of oil in Tabasco. 

That’s when my search to reach certain places began. Eventually, I found the town that had been swallowed by the sea, where, right in front of it, oil platforms still stood there—around 2022.

It was very important for me to capture all of this and reveal that it doesn’t just affect the workers, but that it’s a chain of consequences that extends beyond my own surroundings and family.