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🇵🇾 Paraguay /Culture & Society

Mexican filmmaker Nathalia Acevedo brings her dreamlike, sensory “Beauty Salon” to Venice

From ABC Color · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

In-depth Named sources Outcome reported
  • Mexican actor Nathalia Acevedo debuted as a director at Venice with “Beauty Salon,” an adaptation of Mario Bellatin’s novel.
  • The film explores fear of outsiders, life’s fragility and the possibility that modern society could collapse.
  • Acevedo said the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the project but also gave its story of an unknown disease a prophetic resonance.

Nathalia Acevedo arrived at the Venice Film Festival as a first-time director with “Beauty Salon,” a dreamlike and sensory film about human fragility and the risk of social collapse.

Fear of the other, fragility and the ephemeral nature of life.

· Nathalia AcevedoThe director identified the themes at the heart of her debut film.

The film screened in the Venice Critics’ Week, a parallel competition for auteur cinema. It draws on Mexican writer Mario Bellatin’s novel of the same name, while also incorporating elements from some of his other books.

The story unfolds in a barber shop in an unnamed city, a limbo where space and time overlap. An anonymous man, played by Sam Louwyck, takes in poor people who have been rejected by society and are close to death from a rare illness. The Individuo, portrayed almost like a deity, cares for them and for his beloved fish, while the outside world reaches the salon only through echoes and aquatic, sensual memories of a better past.

Collapse.

· Nathalia AcevedoAcevedo used the word to describe the risk facing the modern world in the film’s concerns.

“It is a journey between memory, the present and the past,” Acevedo said. She described the film’s central concerns as “fear of the other, fragility and the ephemeral nature of life,” along with the repetition of history and the possibility that the modern world could “collapse.”

It is a journey between memory, the present and the past.

· Nathalia AcevedoShe summarized the film’s movement across time and recollection.

Acevedo, who was born in Mexico City in 1984, moved into directing after acting in films including Carlos Reygadas’s “Post Tenebras Lux.” She said she had long wanted to direct, but reading Bellatin’s book made the desire immediate. The COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the project, yet also pushed its development in a new direction. Because the story already centered on a salon threatened by an unknown disease, the pandemic gave the adaptation what Acevedo called a “prophetic” quality. She said she was very happy to premiere at the festival’s auteur-focused section, which she considers the best place for a risky film that had been long and difficult to make.

Prophetic.

· Nathalia AcevedoShe described the film’s resonance after the COVID-19 pandemic, given its story of an unknown disease.
About this summary

Originally published by ABC Color in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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