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