I wake up at 5 AM. It is Election Day in Mexico. I drive from Los Angeles to Tijuana. The sun is rising over the 405 south. 8:00 AM I arrive in San Ysidro, park and walk across the bridge to the other side. It smells different. It is hotter. I am always amazed how the arbitrary wall has become part of nature's subconscious. I wait in a winding line for three hours to cast my vote. I vote and start the trip back across the border. Another eternal line in the hot sun. A man offers me a ride for $5.00 I can't resist. I climb into a bus only a few meters from the checkpoint. It is hot as hell. It smells. Children are screaming. The bus doesn't move. I wish I were standing in line.

The bearded man next to me turns to me and says, "you are not Mexican." "Of course I am", I reply. He insists that I am not. With pride I show him the brown ink stain on my thumb - proof that I have just voted. It has no effect. I can´t change his mind about mi nationality and I have the familiar sensation that I do not belong to any place. I remember a passage from Isabel Allende´s book My Invented Country, "I have been a pilgrim along more roads than I care to remember. From saying good-bye so often my roots have dried up, and I have had to grow others, which, lacking a geography to sink into, have taken hold in my memory."And I realize that film is the memory I am wrapping my roots around.

My current project, El General is inspired by my grandmother’s voice recording, her will to remember her own life and piece together her fractured memory so that we could understand both our family and our country’s history. It is the details of her memory and her moments of hesitation that reveal her most human qualities and bring her and the past to life. Listening to my grandmother’s tapes I inevitably feel that I am having a conversation with her and with the past. How do we reconcile the contradictions between our personal family memories and our country’s collective memory? How is this memory and history fabricated? How do I, Natalia Almada, reconcile my reality with my family history? How do I, a Mexican, understand Mexico today through a historical lens?

The title of my first film, All Water has a Perfect Memory, was inspired by a passage in a Tony Morrison essay in which she writes, “The Mississippi River is not flooding, it is remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and if forever trying to get back to where it was.” The film is about my sister who drowned when she was two and I was just an infant. Through film I created a visual memory of my sister of whom I had no real memories and explored how my Mexican father and American Mother faced the death of their child. While it is a personal film, I was interested in examining how the memories we fabricate are unique to our individual experience and perspective making it nearly impossible to have a truly collective memory, especially within a bi-cultural family.

My second film Al Otro Lado, looks at immigration and drug trafficking through the 200-year-old tradition of corrido music. On my family’s cattle ranch in Sinaloa, I grew up listening to the cowboys and local fishermen talk about opium fields in sierra and their adventures across the border to work in the pisca. The films that I saw in the United States about immigration and drug trafficking were always from an outsider’s perspective and approached the issues as moral dilemmas rather than economic realities. I felt a need to tell the story, of the Mexican individuals confronted with the reality of the economic crisis forcing them to risk their lives in hopes for a better life. The film ultimately indicts the injustice of an economic reality that allows for people to dying along the border, while simultaneously shedding light on the power of the human spirit to confront hardship and tragedy with humor, cultural heritage and grace. By putting a human face to these issues and using music to bridge the cultural divide, my hope is that my film gives a voice to the people most affected and least heard in this socio-political arena. In turn the audience must think about the individuals they are really talking about when they talk about statistics and numbers in economics and politics.

While the three films which I’ve embarked on in the past 5 years are all very different in content, form and structure, they are inspired by my curiosity to explore how the past defines who we are today and to create a visual memory that reflects my view of the world. For me, making films is about posing questions. Questions that come from a desire to understand the world around me and then find a language to express what I see and think. I am committed to making visually beautiful films and to continue my search for a unique voice and language that reflects my experience. My hope is that as a filmmaker I will be able to challenge people’s perceptions of the world around them, and expose them to a reality outside of their own. I believe that it is through the details of our individual experiences that we can create a dialogue with diverse audiences and bridge the gap between our cultural and social differences.