Lila Avilés recommends books about unknown Mexico

Now, he has done it again with his second and most recent film, Totemwith which he has already received various recognitions, as the award for Best Fiction Feature Film at the Morelia Film Festival and was recently nominated at the Independent Film Spirit Awards. It is also Mexico’s representative film at the Oscars.

The filmmaker shares with Librotea that “Totem It is an ensemble film with a little protagonist, Sol, a seven-year-old girl who wanders through a family house on a special day, one of those that marks a before and after. I was interested in returning to the idea of ​​home, of how we inhabit a house and how we inhabit ourselves, how we interact.”

Lila really likes microcosms, as she demonstrated with The chambermaid. From his point of view, “if you start going outwards, from a city you go to a state, then to a country, to a planet, to the cosmos… you can go from the giant to the small. I wanted to explore the interaction with everything around us, not just human bondsbut also animals, nature, our environment. My movie It has its light and it has its shadow. Plus, they’re going to have fun watching it.”

Freedom and commitment

After reaching 150 movie theaters throughout Mexico on November 30, under the Cine Caníbal distribution label, Totem will continue to give a lot to talk about.

How does Avilés feel about it? “I think that The most beautiful thing that has left me is that we can create a bond with the viewers. I realize that in the world we are not so different, and although each head is a world, we all have our own microcosms.

“I have been fortunate to be in Africa, Australia, China, Japan, Peru, the United States, Canada, all of Europe and Mexico. Cinema is a mirror in which everyone will see a different cosmogony., according to its history, culture and significance. That’s pure beauty.”

The film has received more than 25 international awardshas been screened in more than 50 festivals, won the three most important awards at the Morelia Film Festival and will soon go to the Oscar. “For me, the key word for making films is ‘freedom,’” explains Lila after asking her what the difference is between making a film for Netflix and one for an author.

“If you have creative freedom, you have everything. I am open to different formats, but For me the beauty of cinema goes beyond having a product. I am a filmmaker and I am also a cinephile. People enter a movie theater and leave different. I like that stories go through you,” she concludes.

Lila Avilés recommends books about unknown Mexico

If you want to understand a little more about Mexico, get closer to beyond the history that we already know about Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, I recommend this great book. León Portilla recovers the knowledge of the wonderful wise grandparents of Mexico, and studies their languages, their traditions. Any of his books is beautiful.

If we want to understand a little history of Mexico, it is essential to read this book.

Jacobo Ginberg brings us closer to other possibilities in the history of Mexico and its wisdom.

Mateo García Elizondo is one of the actors in my film and he is also a Mexican writer. I highly recommend it.

I’m leaving Mexico and going to Russia, but during the process of creating “Totem” I read a lot of Tolstoy. During the pandemic I made sourdough bread, I started embroidering and I read a lot, a lot, a lot, among several books, his indispensable work.

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