Meet Eva Aridjis | Film Director, Writer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Eva Aridjis and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Eva, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I grew up in a creative household and much of my childhood and adolescence was spent reading, listening to music, going to museums and watching films. Whenever I would feel inspired and stimulated by other people’s work (which was often) I would then take that inspiration and write stories, poems or songs, draw and paint, take photographs, or make videos of my own. Being creative was always a need for me rather than a choice, but I did have a hard time figuring out which medium I wanted to work in. I loved writing, I loved music, I loved the visual arts. So ultimately I chose film, because it allowed me to combine many of my interests and felt less limiting. I could work with language, music and sound, images, color, photography, etc. I also really enjoy the highly collaborative nature of filmmaking, whether I be making a documentary out in the world with interesting people, or creating a fictitious world with actors, a cinematographer, the art department, an editor, and/or all of the many different people who go into making a narrative film.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I grew up in Mexico City and, as mentioned in another section of this profile, I grew up in a creative household and had early and constant exposure to the visual arts and literature. I think that this combined with growing up in such a vibrant and fascinating country- which writer André Breton described as “the most surreal country in the world”, greatly contributed to my decision to telling audiovisual stories because everywhere you turn in Mexico there is something interesting to look at and/or listen to. I studied both Comparative Literature and Anthropology as an undergrad at Princeton, and have always been equally drawn to both fictional and real life stories and characters. So directing both narrative and documentary films has always been essential to me, as I feel equally compelled and comfortable in both worlds and love going back and forth between them.
I love making a documentary and delving into a subject that I find fascinating but don’t know much about when I start the film, as was the case with my Santa Muerte (Saint Death) documentary in which I explore a religious cult and the constantly growing group of people in Mexico (and beyond) who worship death as a female saint. Making this film took me into the homes and neighborhoods of some of her most fervent devotees, as well as the jails where she has a large following among inmates. Although the Santa Muerte cult has a bad reputation due to many narcos and criminals worshipping her, it was important to me to show the wide range of followers she has, most of which are not criminals; many people ask her for health and protection- like sick people- or for help with work, money, school, and love. And then she has a huge following amongst people who don’t feel accepted by the Catholic church, for instance the working class LGBT community in Mexico, I also love making documentaries in which I get to forge a close relationship with a person or family, and be entrusted with helping them tell their stories. With my documentaries “Children of the Street”, about four kids living on the streets of Mexico City, and “Chuy The Wolf Man”, about an extended Mexican family with congenital hypertrichosis (they are nicknamed “the wolf people” due to the hair that covers their faces), I was able to show the very tough daily reality of these two groups of people and help change society’s perception of them in Mexico. Street kids in Mexico City are often viewed as dirty, drug-addicted delinquents. In my profile of four children- Erika, Marcos, Juan and Antonio- I have the kids tell the story of why they left their homes and show their daily struggle to survive. In “Chuy The Wolf Man”, I profiled Chuy and a dozen of his relatives with hypertrichosis, and show how tough their lives are too. The children are made fun of at school, and then as adults they struggle to find work and love, and often wind up exhibiting themselves in circuses to make a living. So with this trilogy of documentaries about “outsiders” and marginalized communities in Mexico, it was very important to me to show who these people really are, what their lives are like, and hopefully help alter the public’s perception of them in a positive way. And as an artist I have learned a lot from them, and have always felt humbled and honored by their trust in me.
And then I also love telling narrative stories, where as a writer I can control the outcome of the story. As a director I love working with cinematographers and sound designers, production designers and costume designers, and of course with the actors, creating a world in which everything looks and sounds the way we want it to. As with my documentaries I am drawn to stories about misfits, and I also love genre films- science fiction, horror, fantasy. I pretty much feel that if I’m going to tell a fictitious story I want it to be real fiction- something that can’t happen in this world- and if I’m going to do reality I’d rather do a documentary (because truth is always stranger than fiction anyway). I also love period films and series, basically as a viewer I want to be transported to a world that is not the one directly in front of me. Growing up I loved reading Greek myths and my favorite film was “The Clash of the Titans”. I also love ghost stories and stories dealing with the supernatural or uncanny. With my film “The Blue Eyes”, about an American couple’s encounter with a shapeshifting witch in Chiapas, Mexico, I was able to combine my love of a dark story with amazing locations like the ruins and waterfalls of Palenque and an “anti-Colonialist” message. I also love animals and got to work with dogs and vultures. In my narrative film “The Favor”- about a man who adopts his friend’s teenage son and the tumultuous relationship between them- the adult character photographs people with their pets, so I got to work with lots of dogs there too. In Mexico there are dogs everywhere, whether they be in people’s homes or on the street, so I guess that is another thing my films all have in common- lots of dogs in them! And I am not religious but I am very interested in religion and spirituality, so that is another common theme in my work which can be seen in both “La Santa Muerte” and “The Blue Eyes”.
Getting where I am today has not been easy (and I continue to struggle). As a female filmmaker it’s been much harder for me to get funding for my projects, and this is also one of the reasons I have made more documentaries than fiction films. For a narrative film you need a large crew and a budget of at least a few hundred thousand dollars, whereas with a documentary you can just go out and start filming with very little money or support and you don’t really need much financing until you get to the post-production stage, at which point you can hopefully raise some money using some of your footage. The crew on a documentary is much smaller- for me usually just three people: myself, a cinematographer and a sound recordist- and you don’t pay your subjects or pay for the places you’re shooting as you must do with actors and locations on a narrative film. It’s also been difficult because I’ve made several documentaries in Mexico which are in Spanish, and there’s really no market for them. Most people in Mexico don’t watch documentaries, and in the United States and Europe you might get a foreign fiction film into a theater, or a documentary in English into a theater, but you’re not going to get distribution for a foreign-language documentary.
In the past few years I have branched out in some new directions. I wrote on “Narcos: Mexico” which was a great experience as I learned a lot about TV writing and got to tap into my own knowledge of Mexican history and my experience growing up in Mexico in the 1980s. I co-wrote a graphic novel named “Monarca” with my friend and colleague Leopoldo Gout, about a Mexican girl who transforms into a monarch butterfly and undertakes the migration to Mexico, and it was published by Harper Collins in April 2022. My parents did a lot of environmental work in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s- including convincing then-president Miguel de la Madrid to create the monarch butterfly sanctuaries- and I grew up watching the butterflies come to my father’s home state of Michoacán every winter. I also became a mother in 2014, so I was able to combine a newfound interest in children’s stories with my love of animals. I am a vegan and have always been an animal rights activist. In high school I founded an animal rights group at my school and was also the president of the environmental group, so I am always looking for ways to bring these interests and causes into my work. I also published a book called “Animalia” in 2022, which is a screenplay I wrote many years ago about human-animal hybrids. The story is set in Mexico with an animal rights message, and I published it through (Screen) Play Press, a press I started with fellow filmmaker and friend Christine Vartoughian to release amazing screenplays which have not been made into movies (yet) in book form.
Lastly, I have been working for the past four years on my first US-based documentary ‘Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus”, about the amazing singer Diane Luckey who sang the cult hit song “Goodbye Horses” and then mysteriously vanished for 25 years. I met her in a very unexpected way and we became incredibly close, but I don’t want to reveal too much more about the film right now other than that it will be premiering at festivals in the fall. Music has always been very important to me (I sang in a band for a minute, DJed for 20+ years and have directed several music videos including the one for The Walkmen’s “The Rat”), so this documentary was also very important to me because Q tells us her story not only through her words but also through her music and songs, most of which have never been heard before as they were never released.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
One of the best things about living in New York City is all of the art on display all the time, and while the museums can be very expensive, most of them have “pay what you wish” for the permanent collections or a few hours a week during which admission is free. I would recommend everyone visit are the Egyptian section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hall of Gems and Minerals at the Natural History Museum, and the permanent collections of paintings/sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA. The Cloisters up in the Bronx are also wonderful for medieval art, and for children/families the whole Natural History Museum is great, there’s also a wonderful Jim Henson show on permanent view at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. And there are also of course countless galleries with rotating shows in Chelsea, the Lower East Side and beyond, and these are free to visit. I’ve been living in NYC for almost thirty years now- ever since I came to do an MFA in Film and TV at NYU- and sadly most of my favorite places in New York City for eating, drinking and dancing are long gone. Or at the least the ones that were in Manhattan are! However there are thankfully some newer spots which are great, for instance TV Eye in Ridgewood, a bar/club where you can hear great music any night of the week, thanks to the live bands and DJs they book. And I’m a vegan so I know the vegan restaurants well and there’s more and more of them each year. For a delicious meal I would recommend Avant Garden in the East Village, Ja Ja Ja for vegan Mexican (there’s multiple locations), Spicy Moon for vegan Szechuan (also multiple locations), Blossom (for fine dining) and Buddha Bodhai for Chinese. Superiority Burger just expanded and has great vegetarian and vegan food (with a limited number of items on the menu), and John’s on 12th is a traditional Italian restaurant but they have a huge vegan menu featuring vegan version of all the classics, which I greatly appreciate as a lover of Italian food.
And as a filmmaker I have to recommend my favorite movie theaters. Film Forum is my favorite NY theater, they mostly show repertory films but also screen new arthouse releases and documentaries and have wonderful series each year revolving around a director, actor or genre (for instance Kurosawa films, or Shelley Winters films, or a film noir series). Metrograph also has great programming with lots of director Q+As, pre-chosen seating and an atmospheric restaurant and bar.
And of course one of the best things about NYC is not having to get in a car and being able to walk a lot. I always recommend Prospect Park over Central Park, the latter of which is too manicured and touristy for me, and I also like taking a few trips a year to Brighton Beach and Coney Island, which you can reach via subway and then walk between the two- for a quick fix of sand and seagulls, greasy french fries, and maybe some fairway rides.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would like to shout out to my parents Homero and Betty, who were always incredibly supportive of my creative endeavors and who were a huge inspiration to me as writers and activists. My father is a poet and novelist who has published no less than 60 books, and my mother is a translator and an environmental activist. Together my parents helped shut down a marine turtle slaughterhouse in Oaxaca, pushed to have the monarch butterfly sanctuaries created, and protected the gray whale habitat Laguna San Ignacio from a project that would have drained it to create a massive salt plant. I must also shout out to my sister Chloe, who was my partner in crime listening to Goth music, reading 19th century novels and going vegetarian together in our early adolescence and who has always been my best friend. My sister Chloe is an incredibly talented and successful novelist now, and inspires me constantly with her imagination and humor. I would also like to acknowledge P Adams Sitney, who was my mentor at Princeton University. I took five or six of his film history and theory classes at Princeton and he introduced me to some of my favorite filmmakers- like Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and Michelangelo Antonioni- and I also worked as his assistant for three years.
Lastly I would like to thank Jim Jarmusch, as I saw his first three films back to back in Berlin when I was 12- “Permanent Vacation”, “Stranger than Paradise” and “Down by Law”, and my mind was blown. I realized that films could be artistic, lyrical, cool AND funny, and it was watching these three films which made me decide to be a filmmaker. Eight years later I sent him a videotape with some short films I had made, offering my services to him for free on any upcoming production he might have, and he sent me back a two page handwritten letter encouraging me. So between my love of his work and his generous encouragement of mine, he wound up playing a very important role in my creative life.

Website: www.evaaridjis.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/evaaridjis?lang=en

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/evaaridjis/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@evasophia

Other: Vimeo page for renting/purchasing films: https://vimeo.com/evaaridjis/vod_pages

Image Credits
Still from “The Blue Eyes” directed by Eva Aridjis, (still photographerL Marietta Davis) Still from “La Santa Muerte” directed by Eva Aridjis (still photographer: Brian Hubbard) Still from “Chuy, The Wolf Man” directed by Eva Aridjis (still photographer: Eva Aridjis) Still from “Children of the Street” directed by Eva Aridjis (still photographer: Eva Aridjis) Still from “The Favor” directed by Eva Aridjis (still photographer: Chloe Aridjis) Still from “The Blue Eyes” directed by Eva Aridjis (still photographer: Marietta Davis Eva Aridjis in her apartment (photographer: Veronica Ibarra) Behind the scenes shot from “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus” directed by Eva Aridjis (photographer: Eva Aridjis)