Welcome to our Real Talk series, where we’re talking with artists, filmmakers, and educators we work with at Austin School of Film. We’re asking a cross-section of multimedia creators what inspires their work, how COVID-19 has affected their craft, and what we can hope to look forward to with them in the future.

This afternoon’s highlight is Ana Armengod—a Mexican artist, filmmaker, and educator currently based on the East Coast in Braddock, PA.

Ana is the curator behind our Mexican Horror Film Showcase happening on Friday (October 23) at 7pm.

We caught up with Ana to talk about horror, cultural roots, making art, and how on October 23, she’s curated an evening of horror shorts by Mexican filmmakers with a secret surprise to come.

Ana Armengod (She/Her)

Location: Braddock, PA

Industry/Craft: Artist/Filmmaker & Educator

THE INTERVIEW

“Most of my inspiration comes from personal experiences, I'm very inspired by my culture and the indigenous practice of story-telling and narrative through so many art forms or rituals. Mexico tells these stories through, tapestry, film, dancing, masks, painting, music, dancing, fighting, gathering etc etc. I'm really inspired by that visceral need to share what you see and feel.”

Tell us a little bit about yourself

I'm a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker, born and raised in Mazatlan Sinaloa, I've lived in like 20+ cities in my life but I still feel like growing up in Mazatlan defines so much of who I am. Sinaloa is where the Narco conflict comes from and Mazatlan is a beautiful beach town in the pacific, I grew up in a house that had so much culture and art but also we were suffering from horrible economic problems, everyone did. Mexico went through an economic depression in 1988 and I was born in 1990 after my parents had lost everything.

I mention this because it influenced the way I see life so much, as a young child living in a state that had all this violence and conflict but also had such simple things like the ocean and swaying palm trees, you don't need much to be able to enjoy life when you have those things. Being an artist is always my main gig, but I also play music and currently work for the online platform Big Cartel as well as I continue to be an educator.

You create visual art as well as films, can you share about your illustrations on eggs and what the context of this ongoing project is?

Yes! Illustration / visual art was the way I established myself as an artist when I was 18-19, and still one of my main art focuses. This project is called "The Gifted Egg Project".

I started doing it in 2013, at the time I was really sick with pancreatitis and having doctors tell me I might die, I started thinking a lot about the idea of letting go, of permanence, or art as possession rather than an experience, I grew up getting evicted, when you are taken away from your house not everything makes it back with you, so those possessions suddenly, gone.

I have a really hard time letting go, I've suffered a lot of abuse and violence in my life and I carry that with me, so by making these detailed drawings that take me hours to make, by putting so much of myself into an art form into an object and suddenly breaking it I force myself to experience letting go. And therefore making art no longer an object but an experience.

This project became a lot more personal for me when I was deported in 2015-16 and separated from my husband at the time, getting evicted from a country from a marriage, getting my life changed, my clothes sat folded in another country in my dresser and my books sat unread. It destroyed me, but it also forced me to feel and let go, how do you keep art if you can't physically keep it? If you are evicted or deported or in prison? and it's through memory and through experience that you get to keep those things, no one can take that away from you.

What's the story behind your IG handle @humanleather?

I started going by Ana Humanleather when I was 16-17, I was a punk kid in Mexico who had dropped out of school in 7th grade and became self taught, the first time I lived in the USA I was 16 and I lived in Austin for a couple of months, I was scared of experiencing the world being so young and often pretending I was a lot older than I was, so it going by an alias gave me anonymity. This became more prevalent when I moved to San Diego when I was 17 and then to Columbus when I was 18, I was living with a tourist visa, so I was undocumented. Going by Humanleather left less of a trace of me. Plus it sounds cool, but I am now 30 and I am known by both Ana Armengod and Ana Humanleather, I don't mind it.

You are a huge horror fan and we’ve seen you posting 31 Days of Mexican Horror on your instagram. What draws you to the horror genre? It kinda impossible to not be subjected to horror in Mexico, or at least it was while I was growing up, the two free channels where canal 5 and azteca 7 and they constantly played horror movie marathons, on a random Wednesday in March you would see a Halloween thrilogy, I've never really looked into why that was but I assume getting the rights to show those movies was a lot cheaper.

But anyway, I love the genre because I think it's so freeing, I'm a big fan of honesty and transparency and because of the automatic R rating that horror would get it allowed the genre to do whatever it wanted, to talk about politics, rape, abuse, racism, homophobia, transphobia, to show sex and nudity, a lot of powerful contexts are displayed through horror movies and that speaks so much to me. But also fear is something so primal, we all experience fear, and that fear has such a large range, you can be scared of the dark, or scared of monsters or scared of being murder walking at night or fear of getting your heart broken. Horror is so relative but it's something so important to talk about, if we don't normalize fear then fear takes over us, so to me I think that the horror genre is cathartic.

How did you first get introduced to film? For as long as I can remember movies where part of my life it was an "event" I would go to the theater with my parents and brothers, we would go pick out movies to the videocenter, I would watch them for hours on canal 5 and tv azteca. I think I learned from a young age all these different ways of living through films, even if these films were super produced blockbusters. By the time I was 11 I had lived through really bad things, things an 11 year old should not live through, so I felt really out of place in the world, I felt misunderstood and I wanted so desperately for people to see the world through my eyes, that's what drew me to film and I decided I wanted to be part of it. When I was 12 I started taking film photography classes and that's where it all started.

What do you love about filmmaking? It's so hard for me to answer this question in a simplified way. For me filmmaking is a way to tell stories in a way that feels more tangible because you are being visually stimulated, but also you are allowed to see the world through the filmmakers eyes and that's so interesting to me, to be able to share with others the way I experience life, the way I see light or shadows the things that my eyes meet, the ways my brain works. The interesting part is though this way of sharing someone's inner thoughts can also be violent and forceful, filmmaking opens all these possibilities of making someone feel and experience something. That's so incredibly interesting to me.

As both a visual artist and filmmaker, what inspires you to create? Most of my inspiration comes from personal experiences, I'm very inspired by my culture and the indigenous practice of story-telling and narrative through so many art forms or rituals. Mexico tells these stories through, tapestry, film, dancing, masks, painting, music, dancing, fighting, gathering etc etc. I'm really inspired by that visceral need to share what you see and feel.

What do you find are some of the most challenging aspects of creating? For me consistency and showing up for myself have been the most challenging, it's so hard to create when you are not inspired, and inspiration is often hard to find, you have to be in the mood to do it, and right now with everything happening in the world and things being so emotionally and mentally saturated its really hard to create.

You work with inner city youth as part of the Braddock Youth Project / Media Team, can you talk a little about your work with them? What's your role? The Braddock Youth Project is a community based project that helps youth in Braddock foster and create skills for their future, this a paid project so they can have an after school job that helps them grow. I work with the Media Team teaching youth how to create art and media such as film, photography, zine making, murals etc etc. We often have speakers of multiple disciplines so the youth can really find their voice and calling.

I value my work with BYP so much and all the tips that get sent to me for this Sips and Cinema event on Oct 23rd will be sent to them!

It is no surprise that Austin School of Film is extremely transparent about COVID-19 and how our virtual program launched as a direct response to the ongoing pandemic.

You have been both a contributor at our Anges Varda & Jonas Mekas screening (via Cocktails & Cinema) but also an attendee, can you talk about your experience with Austin School of Film’s PLAY AT HOME program?

I'm really happy and thankful to be able to be involved with the Austin School of Film again. Not only was I able to have a creative outlet by doing so, but also it gave me the opportunity to connect with other artists and filmmakers that are like minded. The reality is that we are all going through really difficult times globally and this is a perfect example of the positive things that can come out of this, for instance in many of the events / talks I attended through the PLAY AT HOME program there where people all over the country and the world, during the beginning of the pandemic I was quarantining in Mexico for two months and I was still able to be part of it and see a lot of my friends and feel less hopeless.

Has it been beneficial to you as an artist and educator? I'm honestly so incredibly impressed with the programming that the Austin School of Film and Faiza have been creating all through these unfortunate times, for me it was really good to see how people were using these platforms for creative outlets and to continue to teach. I 100% took note of the way that the events were being created / taught and used it for teaching the youth this summer during Braddock Youth Project's summer classes, and I'm very thankful that I had a notion of how things worked before I dove into a full summer of teaching teenagers art remotely.

If you’re new to Mexican horror, what’s one feature film you recommend people checking out?

Alucarda 1977 by Juan López Moctezuma. I'm really big into possession horror and religious horror, which is why to me this movies makes it one of the most quintessential Mexican horror movies, since we are a culturally catholic country which was mixed into indigenous rituals through colonization and enslavement, all these aspects make the imaginary you are subjected to from a young age be incredibly gruesomeness and violent and really normalized. Alucarda takes all those aspects of catholicism and the fear of Satan and the devil to make such an amazing movie, the blood color is really vibrant and it has that 70's horror vibe which is so classic.

Anything else you would like to share? Just that I'm excited to share with y'all the 3 shorts I carefully curated for the event on the 23rd! And thank you Faiza for inviting me to be part of this.

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An Interview with Mexican Film Artist Ana Armengod