The Art Corner: The Freedom of Being Yourself
New York-based film director Melina Valdez shares her thoughts about art in climate collapse, escaping labels in the film industry, and individual creative expression.
The Art Corner is a very special place because it is rooted in authenticity: these conversations oscillate with context and perspective, and as we will see today, they are beginning to interweave with each other. I love this aspect because it also reflects much of the work we do on narrative change. Observing how narratives behave, is incredibly insightful.
When I sat down with Melina Valdez, a New York-based film director and artist, the skies in her city were orange, and its citizens were waking up to the fact that climate change is not so distant after all. The smoke from fires that were ravaging Canada was brought to the city by the wind. For 48 hours, New York City had the worst air quality in the world. Even if we wanted to talk right away about art and social justice, we had to address the elephant in the room. “I have this feeling now of dread that I haven’t had, and I know a lot of people close to me feel it too,” she said “The combination of a lot of different aspects of what’s happening in the world are draining me. The only thing I can do is check in on the people I care about.”
Even if there might be discomfort in starting a conversation with such “heaviness”, Valdez and I wanted to sit with this discomfort. Being an artist in the age of extinction and ecological collapse means also this. I mention to her that this situation is giving me mixed feelings, on the one side I feel deeply for the loved ones in New York, on the other I cannot help but think about privilege. You cannot talk about climate change without talking about privilege, without recognising that being able to call this a problem only today is already a privilege.
Cities like New Delhi have these pollution levels daily. It’s scary, we both recognise that, and to manage this fear, as Valdez mentioned, we need to turn to community, to ourselves and our bodies. “There are only so many things I can do as an individual,” she says. What I immediately notice about Valdez is the way she holds nuances when she is speaking, she is open to questioning herself, and throughout our conversation, this aspect of her comes out more often. I ask her how she got to her work today.
“Just being given an opportunity, as a Latina filmmaker is way more important to me than being expected to advance Latin stories”
Starting in fine arts, going to animation and ending up a filmmaker, Valdez says she always liked storytelling as the creation of an emotion-driven universe.
She says that the political side of her work is not necessarily the first thing she looks at when working on a project “ I like to be involved in work that feels brand new and interesting. If it progresses to marginalised communities, it is a bonus. But I won’t have that be the only reason that I created anything. I think the kindness and authenticity, and caring for the people that you bring on into your world is what is crucial.”
To be non-political in today’s world is difficult, especially when coming from a marginalised community, but the true narrative change lies in the ability to choose whether to be explicit about it or not. It reminds me of a recent conversation in the Art Corner with Alisa Nicole Howard, who said that it doesn't mean that if one is marginalised then their whole art identity has to be on that.
“In film school, I made a lot of my work about white people. I liked the idea of a white male story from the perspective of someone who isn’t a white man,” she says. “I feel very passionate about never bending to what people think is the appropriate thing for me to do. I will tell Latin stories, my recent short is a Latin story, but I don’t want to ever be boxed into a genre. I’m also hesitant to even say I have a style. Because there’s so much that I want to explore.” I reflect on her words and realise it’s become almost a courageous choice not to pigeonhole yourself.
“Kindness and authenticity, and caring for the people that you bring on into your world is what is crucial.”
We inevitably begin to talk about labels and I tell her about a recent conversation I had in the art corner with Kim Willis. “I’m not immune to labels. I feel like I subscribe to using them often, but in the world of conversation that we exist in, you know, we’re using labels so much that it becomes part of my language. I feel very strongly about being Latina and being a woman. I just feel this could change, and it’s not the most interesting thing about me. “Labels feel very personal to me, they’re quiet and very dense. I don’t like broadcasting them too much. I don’t like making a big conversational point about myself or my work, I think just being given an opportunity, as a Latina filmmaker is way more important to me than being expected to advance Latin stories. I think just being given the opportunity helps. In general, I don’t want to be expected to only create certain types of stories that have certain types of protagonists. I have felt stifled by those labels sometimes.”
“I feel very strongly about defending the legacy and the importance of communities that have given us so much to this country,” she says referring to indigenous and black communities “but it can’t be everything that people are known for.” She is quite firm in this but explores the nuances and respects that this might feel completely different for others. She tells me that for her it is not a rejection of the labels, but rather a silent integration within the work.
What Valdez brings to the table is a very interesting reflection point especially when it comes to the way artists are portrayed by others. It reminds me of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who spoke of the danger of a single story.
“If I make a story about a white man, it’s still my voice, which is very different from a white man telling a story about a white man, or from that lens, him telling a story about a Latino!” she says with fervour. I understand that this is something Valdez feels very strongly about, and it is reflected in her work, which is extremely varied and goes from comedy about Dominican families to horror, to her most recent work Weapons and their Names, which was selected at Sundance Festival.
The story follows a Latina immigrant whose stepfather recently passed away, who, overwhelmed by the pressure of having to care for her grieving mother and young brother, spends an afternoon shooting guns in the forest. The aesthetic of the film reminds me of Trey Edward Shults Waves meets the mystical world of Chilean writer Isabel Allende.
In those sixteen minutes, a lot is said without it being explicit, and important topics are raised through the images (guns, immigration, grief, and friendship). Valdes’s world is beautiful because it’s varied, and as she told me, “The freedom of being yourself is really beautiful to me”.
