Cecilia Aldarondo

Alexandra: When you were growing up, did you ever experience any moments that made you want to pursue a career in filmmaking?

Cecilia: I don't think I really thought that making films or directing films was an option for me growing up. It was because I didn't see anybody tell me that I could, that it was a viable pathway as a Latina. I internalized this idea that to be a director you had to be out there in Hollywood and you were Steven Spielberg or something. I was a huge fan of movies. I would say my biggest hobby was going to the movies and seeing whatever. There is an independent cinema in Orlando, very near where I was born, called Enzian. When I was a kid, I would go there for their kids’ programming, but it was also an art house cinema. So I just…I was there all the time.

Alexandra: I noticed you tend to do mostly documentaries. Can you tell me what made you decide to pursue documentaries?

Cecilia: After college, I graduated with a degree in English. I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I ended up getting a job at a film festival because I was like, well, I like movies. I ended up getting assigned to administer the selection of the documentaries. People would actually get together— the committee would get together—to watch everything together in person. I got to sit in on all those meetings. It was kind of a crash course in documentary. I didn't really understand what it was as a medium and what was possible. And that just got me very interested. 

Then I went to grad school and I was just always afraid to make films. I didn't think that I was talented. I didn't think I had ideas. And I thought, oh, I'm a good writer. I should write about film and become a critic. I was interested in possibly becoming an academic, because I was nerdy. And so then I did my PhD. As part of that PhD, I made a documentary film, as one of my areas of study, and so I spent a lot of time studying the history and the form of the medium of that genre of filmmaking.  When I finally got the idea to make my first film, which is Memories of a Penitent Heart, I actually realized I knew a lot about documentaries and it was really that film and the archival material that gave rise to it. And the fact that it was a story about my uncle. I just was like, I want to make a film about my uncle.

And that's why I ended up in documentaries.

Alexandra: In your film Memories of a Penitent Heartˆ, there’s a theme of family relationships. You spoke with your mother about forgiving her for the relationship she had with your uncle. What was the process for you to include your mom in your film? 

Cecilia: She was the origin of it all, because she found these home movies in the garage that had just been sitting there. This was after my grandfather had passed away and she was cleaning things out. And she was like, “Are you interested in these?” And I was like, “Yeah, I'm super curious.” It was on eight millimeter film. And she basically said, “If you digitize them and give me a digital copy, you can do whatever you want with them.” That was kind of where it started. 

She was always really important to the process because she was the only surviving member of her own immediate family. What she knew or didn't know was really crucial to the process of searching for my uncle's partner, Aquin. What was tricky about it was that when I started making the film, I didn't know where it would lead and I didn't know that it was going to become my career.

I started out the film as a daughter, and then I ended up as a filmmaker. One of the challenges of first person filmmaking is: where does my story, and the other person's story begin—the family members or the lovers or whoever it is that's personal to you? That had its own challenges, because my mom was wanting to be supportive of me, but it also brought up a lot of painful stuff for her. She was being asked to relive things. I also underestimated the kind of power I was going to have by making a film.

People are encouraged to pick up a camera without being trained in the ethics of that. What you're asking of people, if you're asking somebody to participate in a film like this, I was pretty naive about all that stuff. It was a real path that we had to go through—this very complicated path. She supported me all the way through, but, in terms of mother daughter relationships that can be particularly tense.

It was a real challenge. But the thing that really shifted for her in terms of her own participation was when the film started to circulate with audiences. She started to hear from people who were impacted by it, who had lived similar things, and would come up to her after screenings and say, “Thank you for doing this.”

Ultimately, it was a really beautiful thing, but there were a lot of growing pains. 

Alexandra: The way you got Aquin, Miguel's partner, to talk about Miguel through the perspective of his partner… would the film have had a different outcome if you just interviewed your family and friends of Miguel? Do you think your film would have had a different lens if it was without Aquin? 

Cecilia: 100%. I mean, that ultimately was always the goal :to find him. Once I found him, once we were connected, it was almost the opposite. It was almost like he wanted the movie to be about him and not Miguel. He definitely wanted the spotlight, it was never hard to convince him to participate. Ultimately a major goal of mine was to try and understand my uncle as a gay man. It's a major theme of the film: this is how, if a biological family has control over someone's history, there's a huge gap there. So if I'd never found Aquin, I don't think there'd be a film. I don't think it would have worked as a film. I remember when I was early on trying to get the film off the ground, it was often the thing where people, before I found him, would say, “Well, give us a call when you’ve found him.”

It changed everything. 

Alexandra: Your films are very vulnerable and personal, like Memories of a Pentate Heart, and also, You Were My First Boyfriend. Even with the production values, it just doesn't feel filtered. And it's very raw and genuine. Have you used filmmaking as a therapeutic tool?

Cecilia: Every film I've made, the need to make it has come out of something that I have to work through or understand better. That is one of the things I love about filmmaking is that every project helps me to grow and to process something. I don't think it's therapy. I think there are therapeutic aspects to it, but therapy is its own practice, its own specialty, has its own rules, and codes.

I would say filmmaking is also its own thing. With Memories of Penitent Heart, a huge part of that was understanding myself as the artist in the family, as the more political one. Really understanding my own personal politics through this project of getting to know my uncle better and really grieving and coming to a measure of peace over what had happened in my family. With,Landfall, my second feature was also deeply personal because it was, as a Puerto Rican outside of Puerto Rico, seeing the devastation that was happening, and the cruelty of that—that trauma. There was a lot of grief there that I was also working through. Even though it wasn't as obviously personal, it was a deeply personal project. With You Were My First Boyfriend, it was all about all those old wounds of my adolescence. Art making is deeply personal. I think the most memorable and indelible work often comes from a very personal place, even if it doesn't look like it on the surface.

Alexandra: How do you go about capturing authentic emotions? 

Cecilia: I would say as far as feeling authentic, I mean, audiences are smart and they can sense when they're being manipulated or when somebody's being phony. I teach a course on personal filmmaking now, and this is one of the things that I always talk to my students about, is that if you're withholding something, and you're making a film about your own personal life, if you're being evasive, if you're trying to make yourself look good, then people will smell that.

They'll be able to, and then they won't trust you. It's about being willing to be vulnerable and to not always look the best and to acknowledge your own blind spots or failings. That is just as important as knowing what you want to do and following your instincts as an artist.

Alexandra: Speaking of Landfall, were there any memorable moments or encounters you had with people from Puerto Rico while you were there?

Cecilia: So many. I mean, honestly, it was a huge part of the joy of making that film. I mean, we were making it in really painful circumstances, but it enabled me to completely reframe my relationship to my homeland. It's the most time I've ever spent in Puerto Rico as an adult, or even as a kid, and in a continuous way I made connections that I never would have made otherwise.

I made the film in collaboration with an activist based there, Lale Namerrow Pastor. We didn't know each other before this project and they're my chosen family now. And we had our challenges, but we also had so much fun and we would laugh our asses off.

The time we spent in Vieques—it's filming with the couple that really, they're kind of at the heart of the film. We were just driving around, they were showing us all their favorite places, it's the best way to travel somewhere. There were a lot of challenges making that film— as I said, it came from a place of grief—but ultimately one of the biggest themes in that film is how people come together in the face of really difficult circumstances. Out of that crisis, there were a lot of beautiful things that I got to experience. 

Alexandra: Yeah. I love seeing how you captured the landscape, your close up shots of birds and the sky and the nature was so beautiful to see, and the people. With the locals in Puerto Rico they had a sense of friendship and community for the land. Was that the same way with the crew you had for this film? 

Cecilia: No, I want to say that the cinematographer is a filmmaker named Pablo Alvarez Mesa, who is actually from Colombia. He lives in Montreal and he'd never been to Puerto Rico before this. We were introduced through mutual friends and I met him for the first time in San Juan.

I initially thought I was making a short and we flew him in to start working together. And same with Lale, we became friends through making this, but everything was, sort of,  going on hunches, like, are you somebody? I generally try really hard to only collaborate with people that I like, people that not only do I respect them and their professionalism and their talents, but I also want to be able to enjoy my time with them. In all my films, I think part of the emotion in them comes from that. Same thing with You Were My First Boyfriend.  I mean, we just had such a ball, the crew and everybody that I collaborated with. One of the great joys of filmmaking is getting to collaborate with people that you end up bonded to for life. 

Film Stills from Landfall (2020)

Alexandra: Yeah, I saw that in You Were My First Boyfriend, the director was another female director, Sarah Hagey. How it was working and collaborating with a fellow female director?

You Were My First Boyfriend (2023)

Cecilia: Sarah was, again, somebody I didn't know before, we were introduced by a  mutual friend. I was looking for somebody to write the fiction scenes with me, because I had no background in fiction filmmaking and I was like, I have to figure out how I'm going to shoot these reenactments. I was looking for somebody who had an interest in teen movies. She turned out to be somebody who knew more about teen movies than anybody I've ever met. We just had a...we kind of clicked creatively. We ended up expanding her role, and gradually she became a co-writer. She went from kind of a consulting writer to co-writer. And then by the time we got to shoot the recreations, it became really clear that she had to be on set. It's a very unusual thing. Usually directors are not known for really wanting to share very much, especially a credit.

It's usually determined in advance what your roles are. And this was something that grew organically and it became a thing that needed to happen. What became clear was that creatively everything from what recreations we were going to stage, what the scenes were going to look like, but also all the film references that we were going to draw from, there was a point at which my ideas and Sarah's ideas, the boundary was very fluid. Suddenly we were on set and she was coaching me on takes.

And it was like, “I think you're co-directing this. I don't think you are, you are just writing this with me.” It kind of shocked me.  Again, it's not very common for a director to share a directing credit like that. It felt true to what we were doing. It was a total joy to work with her. I needed somebody who not only would help me creatively, but she really supported me. There was a lot that was really emotionally challenging and painful. She didn't just co-direct, she co-edited, she co-designed the sound. She had her fingers in a lot of pies. I feel like every project has its own creative needs and its own needs for collaboration, and this was one where I can't imagine doing it without her. 

Alexandra: What made you choose between real life, like going back to your high school reunion and talking to the guy you had a crush on, and then having contrast with reenacting memories. Why did you choose to go with those two? 

Cecilia: Well, it was always a hybrid thing because this is a movie that's ultimately about the relationship between reality and fantasy. And I was just as interested in the way I remembered things. I was aware that I remembered these things in a very raw and vulnerable and very intense way, but I was also aware that I probably remembered them wrong. And so, in a way, I was eager to confront the falseness of my own narrative. And so in order to do that, I kind of had to do both things. It was like, I want to give voice to and texture to inform the ways that I recall this, because this is what I think adults are carrying around with them. But I also then wanted to force myself to confront the possibility that I've gotten it wrong.

It was always a hybrid film in that regard. And then, I think, figuring out what was going to be staged and what was going to happen in real life, this was a very experimental process and it was trial and error.  And there are a lot of people I contacted from my adolescence that didn't want to be in the film and didn't want to participate. I had to do a lot of brainstorming and just see what worked. There were reenactments that we shot that we ended up cutting. The interplay between the documentary and the reenactments was really complicated to figure out. And there were moments that we were like, this has to be in the behind the scenes and not in the stage parts. 

Alexandra: I felt like you're also learning a lot about yourself through the process and through going back. Was there anything new you learned about yourself? Or that you would like to tell your teenage self now that you’ve established yourself along the way?

Cecilia: The biggest thing I learned, which is in a way the message of the film, is people give you kind of cliché advice as a teenager and well into adulthood. Like, you shouldn't care what those people think, or you shouldn't care what other people think about you. But to really internalize that information and understand that I had been expending emotional energy on people that have held resentments, like they say, don't let this thing rent space in your head. I was doing that, and all of my bitterness was based on memories that I was giving so much attention to that really ultimately didn't matter as much as this incredible friend that I had, that had, actually, given me a lot of joy.

And it was like, I was letting all the bad crowd out the good. It really helped me to grow in self-confidence and realize that  I really should follow my instincts and only give energy to the people that really want me around and really like me. I think making this film…really, it did. I feel very different than I did when I started it. And I have Caroline [Cecilia’s childhood best friend] to thank for that. 

Alexandra: Yeah, I really love the style too. It was like very scrapbooky, then you had home video tapes. How did you go about having animation at times, and then scrapbook images, and then using home video?

Cecilia: We didn't know that those home movies existed until we were pretty far into the development of the film. It was one of those things I had made up. I had made Memories of the Penitent Heart and in that whole time, my mom had never found these home movies. And then suddenly she was like, Oh, I found these. And I mean, it was like, it kind of drove me crazy because I was like, how did you not find these before? But luckily we did. I always tell my students in any filmmaking class, in particular, any kind of personal filmmaking class, you never know what exists. Always ask your parents, always ask your grandparents, always ask anybody that might be the keeper of stuff. Because you'd be surprised at what's there.

For example, finding that Joel, the guy I had the crush on, was in my family's home movies. I was like, “Oh my God, there he is.” And watching that footage, when we found him in the home movie footage, I got the same sinking feeling that I'd had when I was in eighth grade, when I would see him, at school or in church or something.

With regard to the animation, this is a film that in a way started with my diaries. We knew that we were also really interested in the aesthetics of adolescence. But also a pre-internet kind of adolescence, a very analog adolescence. We were drawing inspiration from teen movies, but also teen bedrooms and especially girls who narrate their own lives and understand themselves through collages and diary-keeping and scrapbooking.

And so I always knew that was going to be an important opportunity we wanted to exploit. Very early on, I started working with an animator named Lucy Munger, who we were introduced by a friend, and even before we really got the funding together, we were working, collaborating to get some placeholder things. She works in a very analog style. I'm now working with her again on a new project. She also did the animations for a documentary called Fire of Love, which was nominated for an Academy Award last year. She has a very unique, very hands on, very tactile style. It was always something that I wanted to bring in as a creative element.

Alexandra: In our class we've been talking a lot about experimental. filmmaking and feminism. And I was wondering, how do you define experimental and feminist and what do these terms mean to you? 

Cecilia: I think they can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I think when you talk about experimental filmmaking, it's often, within certain traditions like the American avant garde or European. But it can also mean a kind of orientation towards your source material .  Sometimes experimental can mean a refusal or a challenge of narrative convention. For example, a desire to go against the grain, to make films that are not necessarily following traditional genres. I think of You Were My First Boyfriend as experimental.

The whole thing was an experiment. It was a “what if” kind of scenario, and we were really pushing the boundaries of genre. But  there's also a way in which it satisfies a conventional way of movie going. It's in dialogue with pop culture and with stuff that. Often people who are more diehard about how they define experimental would be like, that's not experimental at all, because it has, for example, a discernible narrative structure. It's got three acts. So I think “experimental” can mean a lot of things. I remember in the film festival I worked at, they said “we program everything except experimental.”  And, to me, it was more symptomatic of what their prejudices were than what experimental actually meant. So sometimes you'll use “experimental,” because it means, to them, anti-market or non-narrative, but that doesn't necessarily define it. It's a very porous word. 

And, I guess, similarly with feminism. For me, feminism is about the liberation of all people raised as female, assigned female at birth, and the desire for equality, to redress the inequality, violences and injustices of patriarchy. Western society is built on patriarchy. It's built on the dominance of men. And so, for me, I think feminism can have a lot of different manifestations, a lot of ways that people can connect to it. The now-cliché adage “the personal is political” is something I really find very meaningful to me.

I always go back to that idea. And I think all my work, even though it's quite personal, is also deeply political. There's a lot of different ways that feminism can manifest. I think I make films in a feminist way and that I'm trying to work collaboratively and to respect and not just simply dominate my team that I build. I also build my teams in a feminist way when I think about the representation of who is getting the opportunities to work on this project. 

Alexandra: I wanted to interview a Latina filmmaker and I wanted to know how your identity and being a Latina filmmaker influences your filmmaking. 

Cecilia: It's a huge part of how I see the world and who I am, and the cultural values, the ideologies that surround me.  Every single one of the films I've made, in a different way, intersects with my identity, not just as a Latina, but as a Puerto Rican. I think that the way we talk about identity markers is often very reductionist and very simplistic.

For example, I'm always seeking to parse out the nuance in my identity and saying, “okay, yes, I'm Puerto Rican, but I'm also Puerto Rican who grew up in diaspora.” I didn't grow up in Puerto Rico. So what does that mean in terms of my relationship to language, my relationship to whiteness? If you look at You Were My First Boyfriend, that whole movie is, in a way, about being Latina, but it's about being Latina growing up in a very assimilationist culture. Growing up separated from my community, except my family, and how that plays into self image and how you don't like yourself. 

With Landfall, it was all about that. I believe really firmly that filmmakers should not feel forced to only speak about their identity markers. We give white filmmakers a lot more room and latitude to explore topics and stories that are further afield from one's immediate experience. And so I also think it's something I have experienced: feeling kind of ghettoized in a way that people not only want me to tell stories about Puerto Rico, but they want me to tell them in a particularly narrow way, stylistically narrow. The nuances that I seek in exploring questions of identity, it's often a challenge to fight for them.

Alexandra Tineo conducted this via Zoom on May 2, 2024. She is in her third year of her undergraduate career majoring in Film and Digital Media, at the University of California, Santa Cruz.