Uprising: Faride Schroeder on Her Honest and Intimate Creations
Faride Schroeder is a Mexican writer and director, currently on the roster Stateside at Burbank-based production company MADRE. Her authentic slice-of-life portraiture and stylish cinematography has crossed genres and mediums - ads for the likes of Victoria Beer, a TV documentary with Eva Longoria, short films, and an upcoming feature film.
Growing up in Mexico with Lebanese, German and local indigenous heritage, Faride was surrounded by an international mix of cultural and creative influences - something she is now realising has shaped her outlook as a filmmaker. “It has given me an eclectic way of seeing things - my Mexican heritage has given me a good dose of surrealism and magical realism in my way of seeing things in cinema and audiovisual creation. And both Mexican and Lebanese cultures have deep roots in family and community, and are full of myths and legends.”
“There is a lot of richness, texture and multilayered meanings which have permeated the way I tell stories,” she adds. “It’s also given me a social approach and made me question gender roles in society. From the German side, I’m less immersed, but I notice that I get super precise, demanding, and detail-oriented when working, just like my father and my grandfather, but it’s mixed with the fluidity of my other genes.”
Above: Faride [top centre] and crew
Faride first fell in love with filmmaking after some early experiences on set in Mexico, one as an extra for the 2001 Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas film ‘Original Sin’, aged 14, and another working on a friend’s student film several years later. “We shot on an island of dunes in the north of Mexico,” she says. “Just imagine that landscape! I fell in love with cinema, and never left.”
Discussing the formative experience on ‘Original Sin’, the filmmaker says it opened her eyes to the possibility of her future career, discovering ‘her world’ and following her gut towards cinema ever since.
“The second AD kept putting me close to the camera of Rodrigo Prieto, the Oscar-nominated Mexican cinematographer, so I was able to watch him operating the camera and doing his craft. When the film premiered, people used to ask me where I was on screen and I noticed that I didn’t care at all, but I remembered the camera movements on set while seeing the shots on screen! Now, some of the members of the crew are my colleagues, which I find very beautiful.”
An energetic child, spurred on by her twin brother, Faride says she honed her creativity at night after long days of sport, climbing trees and dancing - her main hobby growing up. During the day, she would choreograph routines and dance at national competitions, but she spent long sleepless nights drawing, painting, collaging and writing.
“The first time I thought I could be a director was because I was choreographing something, and somebody told me, ‘Hey, you know what? You're a good director - like a scene director’. I used to bring storytelling to the choreography and when I direct, I see a dance between the actors and the camera. Editing and storytelling are all about timing and rhythm.”
Above: Victoria Beer - Your Victory is Here
Describing her career thus far as “eclectic”, Faride highlights two very different moments that altered the trajectory of her career, Firstly, she had a “coming of age” moment as a filmmaker with a short film about gender and social issues that played at international festivals. But secondly, she saw her commercial work take off after signing with MADRE and creating a long-form branded documentary for Victoria Beer and Ogilvy Chicago.
“It champions the biculturality and the immigrant journey in the US. They gave me a lot of freedom and were very open to my vision as a filmmaker. That was an important project for modelling my profile as an international advertising director.”
She continues, “If you look at my projects, even if they are very different, there's something in the core that’s my gaze as a filmmaker. I try to put sensitivity, intimacy, truthfulness and representation into every project, no matter if it’s film, television or advertising. When you approach creation with honesty and intimacy, something magical happens.”
This authenticity has paid dividends, as her short films ‘Oasis’, which won Nespresso Talents awards, and ‘Daughters of Witches’, are both being developed into features.
‘Oasis’ is a powerful and intimate documentary about home births that Faride shot alone during the pandemic. “It means the world to me, it transformed my whole perception of a planet that seems falling to pieces,” she says. “It gave me hope and took me on a journey of sorority and female revolution in the most intimate way.”
“I was one of the handful of human beings in such a special and vulnerable moment, and I knew I had to be completely present as a human being and a woman, not just as a filmmaker. What you see in those oases is very impressive - it’s life itself. Sometimes I was crying silently behind the camera and Itzel, the gynaecologist, came to clean my tears. Sometimes all the women joined in with the mother’s voice and I discovered myself being part of the tribe doing the same. Other times, I put down the camera and left it recording the audio of the mother, giving her words of encouragement when she needed them.”
Above: Still from 'Oasis'
Fortunately, the project received media attention and led to her Hulu horror short, ‘Daughters of Witches’. A story about a female lineage of Mexican healers, Faride worked closely with Oscar-nominated star Yalitza Aparicio to use the genre to talk about deep human conditions.
On set, the director was concerned about being respectful to the woods they filmed in, its energy and history. So, she consulted with a temazcalera, a healer, who advised to make an offering of flowers to the shoot location, which she did privately with Yalitza after excusing the crew. “We asked for permission to shoot all the beings and souls that inhabit the location. We talked about motherhood, identity, fear and magic. Some topics that are portrayed in the short.”
“Minutes later, everyone arrived silently and Yalitza asked for five minutes. Everybody waited in silence. Nobody was watching her, she was just there. Suddenly, Yalitza turned; she was crying already. So, we rolled the camera, I looked at Yalitza, said ‘action’, and she started doing the scene two minutes in a row, running through the woods. When she arrived back at the monitor, I was crying as well. We got it.”
She adds, “I realised that the essence of intimacy and being completely present - trying to be respectful and sensitive - is something that you can do even if it's a little independent personal project, or if it's a project that’s commercial and goes to a big platform. I'm very grateful to have sensitive, human, more conscious people on my projects.”
In the realm of television, Faride recently directed the first two episodes of ‘Searching for Mexico’, a documentary series made with Mexican-American producer Aimee Saldivar and the host and executive producer, Eva Longoria. “Eva realised the power of making the series with Mexican women… She called us her team of ‘Chingonas’ - it was super fun! Eva is very proud of her Mexican heritage and has a masters in Chicano studies, so she has the same values as we do.”
While Faride enjoyed rising to the challenge of documentary filmmaking, learning to release control, be flexible and create a spontaneous atmosphere on set - a “different rhythm” to her advertising and fiction work - she did encounter a difficult situation during production.
Although the crew were mostly Hispanic women, the camera team consisted of British men who didn’t speak Spanish, and so they couldn't understand what the people in front of the camera were saying. “Listening and understanding are clues in documentary filmmaking,” she says. “But the worst part was that the (old, white, male) cameraman was so uncomfortable with a young, Mexican female director telling him where to put the camera and what to do that I had to defend my position on set.”
“That's an extra challenge that many female directors, specifically young female directors and racialised directors, have. Luckily, I'm strong, and Eva realised what was happening, and she made our complicity more solid. We succeeded.”
Above: Faride with Eva and Aimee
While working in Mexico, Faride has seen the industry advance over time, although its progress hasn’t been linear. “Things have evolved a lot and not enough at the same time,” she says. One of these areas that still requires work is in gender participation, and while she notes that female talent has “gained some spaces” since the days of being just one of a few women on set, she says they are “still far from parity”.
No doubt, Mexican cinema has developed a stronger filmmaking community in Faride’s 20 years of involvement; “there are more filmmakers and films getting awards in festivals internationally, and our narratives and cosmovision have become more known worldwide”. However, there is certainly still a need to validate more diverse voices in the space.
“Underrepresented creators, including women, have been pushing hard to get inside the system and change it,” she says, “because there is still an urge for more inclusion, better representation, more awareness and gender perspective, which would only bring richness to the film landscape.”
With this in mind, Faride became a Free The Work ambassador and also co-founded the female collective Dear Sisters in 2018 - events that ‘changed her approach’ to her career.
Above: Faride at the Free the Work launch
“I've been pushing my ideals and values through independent cinema for years, and that’s why we started our collective, but nobody's financing my film career. I'm not from a rich family, so I had to start working in advertising from the beginning. I was concerned, asking myself, ‘What is my work giving to the world?’. I realised that through advertising, we could reach millions of people and hopefully permeate society questioning the paradigms.”
“Again,” she adds, “there is a big representation problem. Female talent has to make much more effort to earn those spaces to do their work, and to get recognition and validation. There is still a lot of gender violence in the industry. So, it’s been very inspiring to fight actively for representation and inclusion in front and behind the camera, to advocate to make the industry a safer place, and to open some doors for the filmmakers coming behind. To be part of the movement [by] transforming my own narratives and sets, but also creating community, spreading awareness in media, panels, film festivals, mentoring students and making alliances with other collectives, other groups of women, and underrepresented creators fighting in their own spheres. We are all doing what we can.”
Her work is clearly not going unnoticed. Nowness, the global video channel for culture, ranked Faride in the top five rising international female directors, and Forbes put her in the top ‘100 Most Creative Mexicans’. While she recognises it’s not all about external approval, she says, “It feels great when the people who are curating the work of very talented global artists see you, value your work, and want people to know about you. That brings new opportunities, so I'm very grateful!”
Above: Faride's recent work for Mount Sinai Healthcare System
Looking forward to finishing the feature film versions of ‘Oasis’ and ‘Daughters of Witches’, Faride is also currently working with young Mexican screenwriter Lore V. Olivera on another female horror script called ‘The House in Coyoacan’, and a dystopian sci-fi love story from the female gaze, titled ‘The Lovers of this World’. “I really want to make these films come to life!”
As well as setting her sights on fiction and documentary series, she’s excited about her career in advertising with MADRE. “They're a great team - we really enjoy working together,” she says. “My goal is to keep getting international projects with better ideas and more relevant messages that can reach more people. I love being on set. I love shooting. I've been doing it for half my life, maybe a bit more. So, I’m ready to get greater opportunities to keep doing what I love.”
This responsibility to platform female talent like Faride doesn’t just fall at the feet of MADRE, or organisations like Dear Sister and Free the Work either, she explains, but with every player, in every corner of the industry. “Media, journalists, curators, festivals, and everybody involved in the audiovisual industry can make personal choices to support women and underrepresented creators by asking where they are.”
“Are there any other gazes out there? Maybe we're not portraying them. Maybe we're not seeing them and giving them enough opportunities. Maybe there's more! The surface shows you just the privileged ones according to the system, which is normally white heterosexual men. But if the industry chooses to go deeper and look further, they can support and make other talents visible while connecting better with wider audiences.”
“Everybody can do something,” she finishes. “Especially people in positions of power and decision-makers. You ask yourself, ‘What can I do?’ and you do it. It’s as simple as that.”
