Natalia Almada's El Velador (The Night Watchman) -- Full Movie

El Velador (The Night Watchman) by Natalia Almada--who is a RISD alum and MacArthur winner--is a film that accompanies a guard named Martin, who watches over large, extravagant mausoleums. Who are the two to three story-high mausoleums for? They are erected for some of Mexico's most notorious drug lords.

A synopsis for the film you can find online explains further that the film is about violence without showing the violence. That poetic idea is one of the reasons why this film is a work of aesthetic journalism, not a just a typical documentary. El Velador depicts normal, everyday life that exists in an environment where well over 50,000 lives have been claimed because of a drug war. The film takes place in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa. Sinaloa is about a 15-20 hour drive from the border, where the filmmaker is from, and a place that is called "Mexico's drug heartland".

After taking office in December 2006, President Felipe Calderon declared war on Mexico's drug cartels. Calderon assigned the military to fight the drug trade in Mexico. That is the background to what Almada saw when she first visited the cemetery to film in July 2009: four new mausoleums under construction and a tractor digging up enough space to bury 300 more bodies. El Velador quietly illustrates the violence spiraling out of control without showing the graphic images of murder. The experience of watching this film is not the way we see violence in the news.

Here are some statements by Almada about her work:

"I wanted to make a film that had that quality of time being abstract so you could understand what it means to live in a place of violence."

Concerning the lack of dialogue in the film:
"Language is usually what we think of in documentary... We usually privilege dialogue over everything else, it's the testimony, the interview and we think if someone tells us about their lives that's how we're going to care about them..."

"If you don't allow things to happen over time, you can't have those experiences as a viewer."

"...fast cutting, it's am aggressive thing to do, but people suffer so much with these slow shots that they're not used to in film, especially on TV. It's awkward... It asks people to stop. And we don't live in a society where you're supposed to stop."

"I'm not interested in making films that say you know here's the problem, here's how I want you to feel and this is what I think you should do. But rather putting the viewer in much more active positions, forcing the viewer to have to make their own opinions and to put pieces together in a way so that any thought that comes at the end is actually theirs."