Still Cinema
Beatrice Ní Bhroin talks to Jonás Cuarón about his unusual debut feature Año Uña, a full-length film constructed entirely out of stills.

Beatrice: There is a political consciousness in your films, why is this important to you?

Jonás: Well, the way the film was done, I took the photographs without knowing what the story was going to be. Then I saw what story it was that I could tell with them. Looking at them, I noticed that the main characters were a girl from the US and a boy from Mexico and I realised a lot of the narrative would be the relationship between these two characters. This allowed me to talk about the relationship between the US and Mexico. This is something very important to me because I grew up in Mexico for part of my life and then I moved to New York. I think the relationship between both languages and both cultures is significant and also in general there’s a very important political relationship between the two countries.

The film is completely made up of still images: how did that affect your traditional role as a director?

As I wasn’t posing anything, I think the role was more that I didn’t intrude on my subject matter. I wanted to be as invisible as possible. But there is also the role of knowing what moment to take. I think a lot of the directing took place afterwards, in editing and writing the screenplay and also in directing the actors when I was recording the audio. Since the images don’t have any expression, a lot of the acting and directing took place while we did the recording of the voices. It was how they said things that gave expression and emotion to the images.

Does work of your father (Alfonso Cuarón) influence your own and do you think because of his successes you’ve been better able to put your work out there?

Well I think when I started making this film I had never thought I was going to do film. I had studied photography and English literature so it was more through the process of making it that I realised that film was a good medium for me because I allowed me to make both the visual and the narrative. This work is work I did pretty much independent of everyone, the only person who helped me through was my girlfriend who edited it and produced it. A lot of the reason I couldn’t ask for support (including my dad’s) was since it was such a strange format no one really understood what I was doing. So I had to just do it on my own, which in a way is a good experience because it allowed my to show to myself and to others that film doesn’t need to be an inaccessible medium and that you can do it by just having a small computer and a camera. So for this project I didn’t have any support from my father. In general the comparison between the two of us is made because of the last name but I think you see from our works that we do pretty different things.

There is a lot emotion in the film, celebrations and tribulations. How do you think these are expressed and come across differently with motion picture and still images?

Well, what I think I ended up liking about this style is that it created a more intimate relationship with the characters. Normally with film you only see the characters in the way you would see them in real life but this format allowed me to play a lot with the inner monologues, the thoughts of the characters. I liked this because it created double-layer characters and intimate relationships with them, which were very interesting for me to explore

This is your first feature. How long was it in the making?

I took the photographs for a year. The experiment was to use a complicated format, a movie with still photographs, and I wanted to make it as accessible as possible. There was a lengthy process afterwards of writing and re-writing. I did many cuts of the movie, which took three years as I kept wanting to polish the film so that the story would be as engaging as possible. Normally people tell me that in the first 5 minutes they are worried about sitting through the whole film but then by minute 7 they forget it’s still photographs and they are more interested in knowing if the little boy is going to get with the girl or… It was mainly the process of writing the story so it would be as engaging as possible.

You have a theme for your film ‘the passage of time and the impermanence of things’. I found it was the older generations in the film that seemed to talk about the theme and then it was an undercurrent to what the younger people in the film were saying and doing. Do you think wisdom comes with age?

In general I think the opposite, I think younger people are wiser but with age you learn how to express it better.

Do you think you would use still photography as a medium for film in the future, if you continue on to do film?

I don’t think that I’m going to use this format for at least for a while because I enjoyed it but I think I learnt what I needed to learn from this experiment. When I started this film I wanted to push the boundaries of filmic language and in the future in general that’s what I’m interested in. I don’t think that you need to be as extreme as to use still photographs to do that, many filmmakers shoot in a conventional way but push those boundaries.

What is your next project, or do you have one?

Right now I’m collaborating on a screenplay with someone else but I have a project that I’m planning to produce and shoot in a more standard way. We’ve been doing a screenplay and shooting the story of a pregnant couple during the last few weeks, it’s a little bit based on the Dardennes’ film The Child.

Have you been doing a lot or work to promote your film?

Yes, especially this year, I went with the film to many festivals trying to push it as much as possible because for me it’s important both as my first film and also as an experiment that I spent many years doing. A large part of the experiment was to make it so that the audience would enjoy it and for me it is very interesting to see the audiences’ response to it.

What is the filmmaking environment like now in Mexico?

There is a whole new generation of filmmakers that I really admire, and who inspired me to make a film as a small production. There’s a whole generation of filmmakers not waiting to get government funding for the films and just writing the stories and finding the way whether with video or however they come to make the film. I think this is happening not only Mexico but worldwide and there is going to be an interest and movement in film because new technologies and new distribution mediums are changing the way we approach film.

Do you think digital media has a big part in that with accessibility of filmmaking?

What I think is cool about our generation is that we grew up around it; film is not as inaccessible as it was for older generations. We all had a video camera or saw a video camera so I think digital media is both making it more accessible and also changing the way in which it is done. Now the Internet is going to be a main way of distribution, it’s also going to change the standards of film. Before a film had to be over 80minutes to be able to be shown in theatres but now on the Internet the length of films and the structure are going to change.

www.myspace.com/anounafilm
You can read a review of Año Uña here