Everything Else Is Noise | Francisco Barreiro

Nicolás Pereda’s minimalism finds in Everything Else Is Noise its most accomplished expression. It is both a dry and juicy minimalism. Dry because of the silences and hesitations that Pereda orchestrates in order to inject real duration into his dramas. Juicy because of the irony that emanates from daily life, where staged details shift the order of priority between objects and sounds, with the ordinary becoming extraordinary, and vice versa.

Because of his scenes, often contained within a single room, and his focus on dialogue, Pereda could be labelled the Mexican-Canadian Hong Sang-soo. Yet, unlike the Korean master, Pereda’s camera constantly plays with the hors cadre and “dances” with the protagonists, who humour us with absurdist situations. Oddity is the vehicle through which social and existential reflection emerges – the social and existential condition of women composers in Mexico being at the centre of Everything Else Is Noise.

Pereda’s significant rhythm of film production goes hand in hand with his collective filmmaking process, which relies on a faithful group of friends. Over the last twenty years, they have become the alphabet of Pereda’s aesthetics and stories. They keep their real names and play different roles, as if in an unfinished film in which the produced works are merely episodes. A dispositif that emphasizes the reality of performance, as opposed to cinematic illusionism.

For this reason, it was a pleasure to meet Francisco Barreiro at the Bildrausch Filmfest in Basel, as he is one of the three main actors with whom Pereda has developed his films. He reveals to us the creative balance within such collective enterprises, stressing the trust and co-authorship that define their collaboration.