alr

The Night Watchman
(El Velador)

$15 Special Event
Natalia Almada in Conversation with Julie Mallozzi
Directed by Natalia Almada.
Mexico, 2011, DCP, color, 72 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.
DCP source: Icarus Films

Born in Mexico City as the great-granddaughter of Mexico’s controversial president Plutarco Elías Calles, Natalia Almada makes intimate films exploring the tragedies in her own family history as well as the current violence in Mexico’s Sinaloa region. Her poetic, multilayered approaches to storytelling have won her a MacArthur Award, two Sundance Documentary Directing Awards, and screenings at Documenta13, The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. This event is part of a three-day visit to Harvard that will include a Shorenstein Center screening of Almada’s film Users on November 13, followed by a conversation with Almada and Shorenstein Documentary Film Fellow Tabitha Jackson.

From the opening shot through a pickup truck’s foggy windshield entering a cemetery at sunset, El Velador is infused with an atmosphere of patient dread. At its center is Martin, who works from dusk until dawn watching over the extravagant mausoleums of some of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords. In portraying the daily labor of those who maintain the cemetery and eschewing the pervasive, graphic images of the violence behind many of these deaths, Almada asks viewers to consider the relationship between the workers and those honored there. Such restraint opens these spaces of contemplation throughout the film. Between Martin’s night shifts, masons frame the high cupolas and spread their cement, coconut vendors roll by with music playing, and florists arrange lavish wreath displays in time for the luxury cars to arrive for services. With radio reports about the weather and the latest murders comprising most of the film’s dialogue, El Veladorbecomes a kind of landscape film: one capturing not only the vistas of this peculiar place but an aura generated by years of gross inequality, corruption and ever-present violence. – Julie Mallozzi

Other film series with this film

Read more

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf

Read more
a close-up of a Bissau-Guinean woman wearing a scarf on her head and looking directly at the camera with a slight smile

Le Dépays + Sans soleil