Macdo, Macdo

The questions that conjured MACDO began to visit my mind in the gap between teenage years and young adulthood. Growing up, I found a sense of belonging in fictional characters. I was fascinated by the possibility of witnessing what it means to be “human”—in all its fears, desires, and transformations. I was enamoured with the thought that one day I would be able to experience the full range of emotions that exists outside the boundaries of obedience and service that childhood is so often kept hostage by.

I spent my childhood in expectation and preparation for the thrill of liberty and expression. It was disappointing to find that being an adult was not about freedom, but about donning the dullest of masks. I felt an imperative: Go find the truth where you’ve seen it happen! To me, that meant cinema.

Can you imagine my heartbreak when I first stepped into a film set and found that the mechanics of conventional narrative cinema were not an extension of wander and freedom, but of those rules, limitations and a set of morals of the disconnected-from-the-heart adult world that I was running away from? Over-planning, pointless repetition, the rigidity of the three-act structure and the imperative for characters to fit in the barrenness of these archaic landscapes, awkward body positions so that the camera captures the “right” image…

I began to gravitate naturally towards a cinema that diverged from the Institutional Mode of Representation. More than formal, this search was moral. I became obsessed with listening to filmmakers speak about the medium and their work. I also took workshops with filmmakers like Victor Erice and Naomi Uman. Author-driven cinema became a green light to place my intuition and childhood senses as the leading sources to make the film that I wanted to see.

MACDO is, in its essence and in its form, an exploration of the limits between love and violence, anger and joy, reality and fiction, the past and the present, and between what we reveal and what we choose to conceal. In more than one way, MACDO is a striptease.

From the beginning, I connected to MACDO as something preexistent, that was instructing me on how to channel it into the world. All of the elements that give substance to a creation made themselves present in my life: I had a strong urge and clarity to explore the subject, talented artists from different film departments were reaching out to me with interest in working together, signs and messages were pointing me in every place that the time to make the film had arrived.

Back then, I was working as a Development Assistant, relying solely on that income and my free time. I quickly realized that in order to make MACDO happen under my circumstances, I had to engage in an exercise of observation and precise actions.

In attuned listening, the path revealed itself step by step to make the exact film I was supposed to make. Can you imagine MACDO being shot on a high-definition camera? So much of its power would be sacrificed. I am thankful for the limitations that led me to use my family’s camera, Amat’s (the film’s Executive Producer) camera, and another one that I got on Facebook Marketplace for 50 euros.

With MACDO, I was not so interested in telling a story, but rather in creating a petri dish, what I so often have called a fictional space, where the questions that ignited my journey of making films were answered, not in a premeditated manner, but rather as revelations manifesting in real time.

To plan the shoot, I returned to my roots as a dancer.

There is nothing more thrilling and potent than melting with the present and having one shot at a performance. Stepping into the flow of the present as a group leads everything to happen at the exact time that it needs to. The perfect example of this is that Negin Khazaee, the film’s DP, who operated CAM A dressed as the Nanny, is Iranian and does not speak Spanish. However, in examining the footage from the camera, a beautiful pas de deux with the characters’ dialogue and actions is revealed. This can only be the result of a collective surrender to the source.

I wanted everyone on the set to engage with what was happening from the same place of mystery and uncertainty real life happens in, so nobody read the screenplay. The fact that we were playing out one of the most popular traditions in our country, one that each member of the cast had already rehearsed multiple times in their lives, served as the perfect amount of predictability that we needed.

I did individual work with each actor and our approach to performance was not as characters, but rather as alter egos. The “fiction” actually started an hour earlier than planned, because as soon as we got into costume, the fictional family took our bodies as vehicles. I say “our” because I embodied Estelle, the pregnant hostess in the film. In a way, my performance became autobiographical: like her, I was hosting the shoot and bringing something to life. I made sure to draw parallels like this for everyone—this was the main ingredient, from my perspective.

How can love be so painful and how is it possible that this pain manages to penetrate every area of our lives, even in the smallest things? This question led me to retrospection, which naturally ended in childhood memories. There was something so beautiful about Christmas celebrations, which, as I got older with my sister by my side, transformed into horror as soon as we began to decode the language and dynamics of the adults.

Contradictions are so juicy from the nectar of truth, and there is nothing as contradictory as passive aggressions on the holiest of family gatherings.

Making a period piece with a small budget was fascinating. To create the concept for Production Design, I worked with Nohemi Gonzalez, who worked on one of my favourite films, Stellet Licht. She pointed out how the key to period piece accuracy was in my family’s closet.

In Mexico, in the 90s, in the region where I grew up, housewives would get together and craft DIY Christmas decorations—even festive toilet covers. This made perfect and beautiful sense. Most of the decorations on the Christmas tree that you see in MACDO were made by my Mum when she was pregnant with me.

Then, for the bedroom scene, the only bed available happened to be none other than the one my parents slept on as newlyweds and throughout the first 20 years of their marriage. It is very likely that I was conceived on that very bed… once again, autobiographical parallels arise. These are the types of elements which brought their own energy into the mix, maximizing MACDO’s autonomy as an entity.