Garber: What were you doing in your early 20’s? What kind of work were you watching and what were you doing creatively?

Cuesta: My background is in photography. I majored in it at Savannah College of Art and Design. I had a minor in film. I always knew that I was interested in moving images and film, but I hadn’t really found a way of thinking about cinema in the experimental form. For example, the film minor was very commercial, focusing on the hierarchical film industry. That wasn't something I was interested in. Photography was much more exciting to me because I could do it by myself, and I really loved being behind the camera.

Early on, I understood that just being behind the camera doesn't mean making an image; it is the content itself, and I really connected with that. When I decided to go to grad school, I didn't know what experimental film was. I got accepted to the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston for an interdisciplinary arts program. I took my first experimental film class with filmmaker Robert Fenz, who ended up being a close friend of mine and a mentor.. I was very much influenced by him and his films.

He’s very much inspired by early city symphonies, avant-garde films of the ‘20s and ‘30s, as well as jazz. He uses celluloid and black and white film, making these stunning visual compositions. I had never seen work like his before. It opened my eyes to a world of creating images that I didn’t know was possible. I was very influenced by photographers, especially documentary street photographers like Robert Frank, Walker Evans, and Paul Strand. After realizing that these photographers went into short films, I started looking in that direction. There’s this film called In The Street by Helen Levitt, which was incredible, first off because she was a woman behind the camera and the difference in sensibility I could see with her images compared to her male colleagues. The film was shot in Spanish Harlem in New York in the ‘40s. She photographs children playing in the street. It was very political but also very lyrical. I’m interested in social issues but from a subjective point of view and using poetry to talk about truth rather than “absolute truth.”

While I was living in Boston, I would travel to New York to go to Queens to this neighborhood called Jackson Heights. I started working on my film, Recordando El Ayer. I was interested in seeing how these Latin communities, specifically Ecuadorian communities, create a communal space, a home away from home. I explored these ideas with the texture and architecture of the street. I then realized that Boston was not the place for me, but I ended up getting to know people living in New York and working with film through many of these experiences. I went to the Anthology Film Archives and saw the work of Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren, Peter Hutton, and many others. I was falling in love with the possibility of creating my own film, making my own images, and editing myself. When I was shooting the Jackson Heights film Recordando El Ayer, I sent the raw footage to CalArts, and I got a scholarship to attend the Film/ Video MFA program. In 2005 I transferred to Cal Arts, where I feel I found my voice. I had incredibly influential teachers there, James Benning, Billy Woodberry, Berenice Reynaud, Betzy Bromberg, and Thom Anderson. Some of the film references that I speak of now in my work I would say are Chantal Akerman, Peter Hutton, Chick Strand, Santiago Alvarez, Johan Van Der Keuken, and many more. I am drawn to artists who are constantly working in a very poetic and subjective way and within political subject matters. Artists who are thinking about not just the form but how confident form can be.

Garber: Thank you, I’m really interested in that path you created for yourself—starting in photography and moving towards experimental film, pushing away mainstream media and corporate work. It’s definitely something I’ve struggled with a lot, juggling my own art with a more lucrative practice.

Cuesta: It’s not easy; I know what you are going through. When I was teaching, not long ago, my students had that same question. It’s tough because the reality of making a living is hard to balance.

Garber: What was the sequence of events that led to the start working on Territorio? Was it brewing for many years, or was there a specific context for you to start work on it?

Cuesta: It was a very long process, almost 8 years of my life. Before Territorio, I had been working only with the film medium (16mm) film. I was making short films and working with a very specific process. Territorio is a feature film, and it’s very different from my other work in terms of length, process, and medium. I had to discover a new process of making. I am originally from Ecuador, but I’m dual U.S. and Ecuadorian citizen, and I had been living in the states for a really long time. I decided to come back to Ecuador, maybe after 12-15 years. So this was the first film I was going to make here. At that time, the government had just started giving out awards for production and post-production as part of the National Film Fund for the Arts. I applied, and of course, I wasn’t sure I would get it because it was not a conventional film project. Usually, these prizes go through a very standard process: script, pitch, etc. I honestly don’t know how I got it, but I got it. All of a sudden I had this money and I had to make this film. I really wanted to connect with small rural areas where I had never been to in my country, as a way to interact with people and places who felt at once familiar yet unfamiliar to me. From the beginning I set guidelines for myself. One of them was that I would trace a map of the territory and go to all the different geographical locations and places that I had never been to before. I was really interested in documenting “the first approach” with me behind the camera. It could be thought of as a road movie in a sense. I traveled with a producer and a sound person and a camera assistant, a much bigger crew than I usually work with.

What is special to me about that film is that I didn’t want to do a documentary that talked about Ecuador per se, meaning, I knew it was about subjective experience. Recently, Almudena Escobar Lopez, wrote about the film, and says “it is not a film about Ecuador, but from Ecuador”. That really resonated with the intention of the film. I was focused on the encounter as a starting point to address questions. I was interested in exploring the reciprocity of the gaze and how that works in film. Of course, I’m looking; the camera is looking, the person is interacting and looking, and the audience is looking as well, so there is this exchange of the gaze throughout the film. These ideas open up questions of representation and the conversation on what it means to look. They question the power of the camera and who has the power, and how that works. I didn’t want to impose a narrative, and that’s why the film was made of these 42 shots that don’t have sequences. I really think of them as windows of time, exploring how time feels t in these small populations where I am the outsider. It is an immense sensation of your body in space, of waiting. That is why most of the scenes that I chose were scenes where seemingly nothing is happening, yet there is so much within the frame: people sitting, looking, or waiting, being.

I think, of course, I was influenced by James Bennings’ films. The first time I saw them, I didn’t know what was happening, but I felt so present in my body. I think that cinema’s power now is something that relates to that, not just to be suspended in reality but actually to have an experience within yourself.

Garber: I noticed that same feeling you are talking about with James Benning. I felt with your film Territorio, I was very present, and I was given the time in each shot to just be with the subject in the frame. I really liked how they were free to move out of and into the frame and look at the camera. Seemingly, there was no direction at all; it was just the encounter between them and the camera. Before filming, how much engagement with the subjects did you deem necessary? I am assuming there wasn’t very much, but if any, what was that?

Cuesta: That’s a great question, and that’s a question that I get a lot from people who watch the film. Of course, as a filmmaker, you can understand the process of filming and how things happen, but people who are not filmmakers usually believe that it is a directed scene. It is not. All of the shots are different, so I can’t say that there is a formula, but since I grabbed a camera - figuring out how to be in a space and how to interact with a person. I don’t want the image to feel like something that is stolen, but I don’t want to be invisible. I also want something to happen. It’s not easy to do that, and I worked towards that for a really long time with Territorio. When you enter a place or town, since their size is so small, once you are there, everybody knows that you are there. You’re not hidden because you have the camera, and you have the production crew with you. Some of the people I would sit down and have a conversation with the day before or while I set up the camera. And some of them I didn’t have conversations with; I just set up the camera. This thing happens in many people’s films called the non-verbal agreement, where you feel that the person is inviting you to film. When I don’t feel that I don’t record, but there is this engagement you feel, there is a performative aspect to it. People are performing for you, and it’s that exchange that I look for.

I feel like Territorio is a culmination of figuring out how I work and finding out how I interact with people with the camera. Now my work is evolving, but when I look back at the first stage of my work, I feel it ends with Territorio.

I had maybe 60 hours of footage for that film made up of a series of static camera shots. Not all of them worked, but sometimes it clicks between the two of you and the moment is there. Some shots were more directed, but for example, the family lying in bed and watching TV. I mean, that was actually happening, but I had met the father the night before, and I shot something with him then. He already knew me, and he invited me to go back the next day. When I went back, he asked me, “What do you want me to do,” and I said, “I’ll film you with just what you are doing.” In small towns, people are more open so that they would invite you into their homes, and I don’t think that would happen in a city. I wanted to be respectful with the moment, but I was also interested in uncovering the tension. That was why a lot of shots that were directed towards the camera kind of questioned the camera. Maybe it makes you feel uncomfortable as a viewer.

Garber: I’m glad you mentioned that shot with the family on the bed. I wanted to ask about one of the young girls who looks over at the camera for a while and then peacefully looks back at the television, returning to her “life.” Talking about the reciprocity of the gaze, I thought this action within the frame was an incredibly compelling statement.

Cuesta: Yes, I really liked that, and I made the intentional choice to leave the little girl looking at the camera. The shot is very long, and I didn’t include the full shot, but I wanted to incorporate that moment because I liked how through here gaze, the viewer has the sense of coming in and out of the awareness of the camera. You can never escape it because you know that it’s being mediated. I want the viewer to be aware of that as well, especially with that scene because they are looking at a movie that is already a suspension of belief. You see the film, and you are going into that reality, but then you come back to this scene. You recognize that you are seeing something that perhaps you shouldn’t be seeing, which builds tension throughout.

Garber: Yes, I definitely recognized that tension. You are watching a child in this intimate and private space only to be “discovered” when she looks directly into the camera. When you were going through these different landscapes did you had a “demographic quota” or specific goals to film people of different ages, class, sex, etc.?

Cuesta: Not really, no, but I did want to explore the different regions because Ecuador is a very small, diverse, and segregated country. We have a large indigenous population, but of course, it’s a colonialist country. So you have people that look like me. Most people that look like me are middle class and live in the cities, and the small towns are usually people of color. They are very much underrepresented in every way, and I think that when they are represented visually, it's very much exotized, usually in anthropological films or tv reportage. My film touches on ethnography, but in a way, it is anti-ethnography. I was trying to be honest about my experience of inhabiting places that were not my own.

There is a reference to a book by the Belgian poet Henri Michiaex who came to Ecuador in 1927 called Ecuador a Travel Journal. He begins in the ocean, which is why there is a reference at the beginning of my film, with the first shot on a boat going inland. The book is fascinating, but problematic as it is written from the point of view of a European coming into an exotic land. However, it is interesting because as an avant-garde poet, he describes in fragments, and his use of fragments was a huge inspiration for the form I created in Territorio. Speaking in fragments is very interesting because you’re not imposing a narrative, it is not a totalitarian view of a place. It’s just small pieces, details, that tell the experience or story through one lens.

Garber: And you seemed to have filled in these gaps so beautifully with these long-form shots.

Cuesta: Thank you. I am interested in leaving space for the viewer to imagine. Even with the frame, I chose mostly medium shots. There are not many wide shots, and they are all closed in because of the details. I didn’t want to show the entire landscape; just fragments, and then the sound sort of reveals what was happening around you. Those were also very intentional choices.

Garber: Thank you! When you were deciding on each shot’s length during post-production, was that a mostly intuitive process?

Cuesta: Yes, for Territorio, usually very intuitive. With my short films, they are more like lyrical compositions and symphonies. For the other films, they are shot in the film and cut on film. The way to edit them is linear, you have a roll of film, and you have to look at the whole thing at once. Maybe you make one cut and put them back together. Often when you connect them, something happens that you weren’t aware of, that you didn’t foresee happening. You just see those two images, and it brings up something new. I love that. I can’t know what I am going to do before I do it. It has to be organic, but with digital (with Territorio), it was very different. I didn’t have my rolls of film. I had everything separated and it took me around three years to edit that film. I worked with a friend who is also a filmmaker from Argentina, Pablo Mazzolo. We worked together editing remotely while he was in Buenos Aires. I would make a change, send it to him, and he would make a change and send it to me. It was a way to really take my time with the film and intuit the images. I chose the shots where not much happens because I wanted the very small gestures. I was choosing from each region, but it was mostly intuitive choices in terms of the duration.

Garber: Another film I had a few questions on was your latest film, Notes, Imprints (On love): Part 1. I found that perhaps more than your other films, this film had a more autobiographical touch. Not in a narrative or explicit way, but more nuanced autobiography. I was curious how that happened and what was the change there? I also noticed there was a large gap between filming and editing, and I wanted to know what happened for you creatively during this time?

Cuesta: Yes. This is my latest film and it’s the first part of a series. The series is called Notes, Imprints (On Love), and there will be six parts all together. As I said before, in a sense, a stage of my work culminates with Territorio, and after that project, I was really not sure anymore about what I wanted to make. I knew I was curious to work in different ways. It was time for something new, but of course you never know what that’s going to look like. I was teaching at the time in Binghamton, New York, at Binghamton University. It was a very cold, strange, challenging place to live in, especially as a foreigner. It’s a post-industrial town, economically depressed, and people are not the most friendly. The winters are around six months. It was a challenging experience, I was in this very demanding job which I loved, but it was exhausting as well. I was having a hard time trying to balance all of this and making work. In a way, I was kind of disenchanted with filmmaking. So I had these rolls of film and I decided to give myself a set of instructions to think of filmmaking as a daily practice. I wanted to practice filmmaking as if you were a painter and you would paint a little bit each day—that whole process lasted for about a year of filming. I wanted to step back from the hierarchy of images. I started making one shot a day. I filmed everything with the same rigurosity: the plant in my kitchen, the factory, snow falling on the deck, my partner’s back as he slept.

Because I was making images of my private space, my private life became part of the film. At the time I was in a relationship which was ending, and I didn’t realize that I was documenting it. Unknowingly I had been creating a narrative of my own life. When the relationship actually ended, I left Binghamton and I continued filming in this manner in the different cities I travelled to. The footage dates from 2017 to 2019. That’s all the footage I have, but it hasn’t been edited yet. Part I of the series is just from 2017, which I edited around two years after I filmed. This film is very personal, but because so much time happened between filming and editing, it also has distance. Editing felt like a life exercise of processing loss. Also, seeing the images of my life, over and over and again, inevitably made me less emotionally attached. It was cathartic, and although it is a very personal film, that distance also opens the film to be interpreted and experienced by those who watch it, bringing their own lives to it.

Garber: What was it like to film in a place that was foreign to you? And what are your thoughts on entering a foreign space and creating images in it? Would you say that this piece creates a conversation between the private and the public spheres? Do you feel that your work relates to the concept of the personal is political popularized by Carol Hanisch in the Second Wave Feminist Movement?

Cuesta: Before starting work on this series, I had never really explored the private, or turning the camera inside towards my own life. However, when I look back, I see that I am present in my films, even when it is not explicit. I am present where I am filming, and the subjects are interacting with me.

This also answers the previous question about entering a new space. For me, I think it has to do with a genuine desire and curiosity to learn something. I do believe that I can speak better with an image than words. Verbal language is not enough in a sense because of its rationality. With images or poetry, which are the same thing, you suggest something, and that suggestion, it leaves things open so that it feels respectful. I believe anyone can film anywhere, but it’s important to know how you approach the situation, and also very important to have a clear and ethical intention. In one of my other films, Despedida, I was genuinely interested in places where significant movements of cultures have happened, and it was important to show the in-between spaces that are usually invisible.

Garber: It seems to me that you describe the camera in your work as an extension of how you see instead of a vehicle for a manipulated image. You present images in a way that is open to interpretation and also respects the subject, even if it is foreign to you.

Cuesta: Yes, that’s the idea. I do hope that’s what it feels like.

Garber: Do you identify with the terms “experimental” and “feminist,”– and what do they mean to you?

Cuesta: This is a tough question. First, I will start with “experimental.” Throughout my career, I really did identify with being an experimental filmmaker, but over the last few years, I have stepped back from those definitions because I feel it pigeonholes my work into a specific history. Even though that history very much inspires me, I don’t feel fully represented there as Latin American filmmaker. Also, even though I connected to the various processes of experimental film, and its political stance within cinema, , I am interested in continually challenging myself to work in new ways and forms, as is the case at the moment with my new feature film right where I am exploring more conventional narrative structures.

As for feminist, that is also really difficult, because, although I think I am a feminist in my life, I also believe that it is dangerous to identify solely as a woman filmmaker. I think that it is more radical to say, “I am a filmmaker,” and not a woman filmmaker.This is more powerful to me. Of course, one brings one's sensibility however you identify to your work, and for me, it is always about the work first. I have been invited to several panels, where the subject of the conversation is “Women Filmmakers” or a “Spotlight on Latin Women Filmmakers.”, and although of course it is an honor to be included, I think it could also be a disservice to us because we are separated from the “main act”.

Garber: It’s like you’re a subset

Cuesta: Yes, it’s like you're a subcategory! We don’t say, “this is a panel of male filmmakers.”

Garber: I feel like you just articulated thoughts I have been having for a long time and have not been able to communicate.

Cuesta: Actually, I I took that from Chantal Akerman, who, for me, is of course a feminist filmmaker, but she says: I am a filmmaker and I am a woman. I think there is a vast difference in saying that.

I was surprised when I was contacted for this interview as “feminist filmmaker” because I don’t see my work necessarily situated in that space. In any case, there aren't as many highly recognized women filmmakers in the experimental film world as men, that is the truth. That history has a male language. To have women experimental filmmakers is so important because not only does it expand the language even further, it also gives more space to diversity: minorities, people of color, etc.

Garber: Feminist filmmakers often work “outside the system” because the tools within the system were created by this “male language” or patriarchal system that you are talking about.

Cuesta: I know that some women filmmakers focus very specifically on feminist issues, of course, my films don’t cover things like that, but I wouldn’t say that makes them any less feminist. If you think of being behind the camera as a woman in the public sphere, it is a very vulnerable situation. This is something that I don’t usually get asked about, but, this position is vital in how I create my films. On the one hand, I am sure I have gotten many of those images because I seem non-threatening. On the other hand, it’s very vulnerable to be somewhere you don’t know, exposed. All of these issues arise just by being a female in public space.

Garber: Exactly. I think that there is a spectrum when it comes to feminist filmmakers, one that might start at one side with “femmage” and Riott Girl and the other with filmmakers like yourself, artists who bring feminist perspective into their work but don’t explicitly define themselves as feminist filmmakers.

Cuesta: I think that’s a great way of looking at it, as a spectrum, because why do we have to subcategorize a subcategory? To be honest, I didn’t have any of these questions early on; maybe I didn’t know how to articulate them, but I was just interested in making my own work. I was interested in expressing what I saw and how I could work with these mediums. All of those questions come later, and maybe it’s a good thing, because academia can sometimes be stifling, and make the act of creation feel less free.

Garber: I’ve felt that for sure. I’ve never really known anything outside of academia, and after entering my college, I didn’t have the guts or the know-how on how to transfer to an art school while still an undergrad. I feel that anger with myself for not allowing art to be what I am committed to doing truly.

Cuesta: I understand entirely, but at the same time, you don’t have all the tools. Life is tough. But have so much time, so don’t be so hard on yourself; you have time to explore. If it is something that you are genuinely interested in, you will find the way, and you are going to meet the right people along the way. Sometimes we have this idea that we can control everything, but we can’t, we don’t. Things happen to us, and everyone’s path is different. What you are learning now will be very useful later.

Garber: I agree. Thank you and thank you very much for your time.

Alexandra Garber is a filmmaker studying Cinema & Digital Media and Italian at the University of California, Davis. She is currently living and working in Davis, CA. Her art explores auto-biography with experimental techniques. She also works as an actor in short indie films and intends to pursue an MFA in filmmaking after undergrad.