Alonso Ruizpalacios: “Racism has no nationality. Like violence, it is something we are all capable of.”

Mexican director Alonso Ruizpalacios premiered his most recent film,

The Kitchen

, as part of the competition at the Berlin International Film Festival, one of the most prestigious and important events in the seventh art.

Curiously, his return occurs a decade after his debut as a director in cinema, the same space where he presented

Güeros

, his debut film.

Ruizpalacios, 46 years old and originally from Mexico City, admits that he “loves” to premiere at the

Berlinale

, where he was previously recognized with the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay, along with Manuel Alcalá, for his work on

Museo

(2018).

“To return to Berlin now, 10 years later, with this film that is also in black and white, is something very symbolic.

I am very excited that it is going out into the world and that this is the door, a very noble, very beautiful one, because it is a festival for film buffs.

It's not a mamon festival.

It's like, you see, where every show is full of people who love cinema,” she says over a video call.

In

The Kitchen

, his fourth feature film, he makes a tragicomic tribute to the invisible undocumented people who work behind the stove in a restaurant that is a tourist trap in Times Square, New York.

For this new production, he has Raúl Briones, who previously worked with Ruizpalacios in

A Police Movie

, as well as the American performer Rooney Mara—nominated for an Oscar for the film

Carol

and for which she received the best actress award at Cannes. —, and additional co-stars such as Anna Díaz, as Estela—a Mexican looking for work in the kitchen who recently arrived in the United States—and the Dominican Laura Gómez, among others.

La Cocina

is an adaptation of

The Kitchen

, a play by Arnold Wesker, the same one that Ruizpalacios staged at the UNAM University Theater Center 13 years ago.

His liking for the work of the British playwright and the experience he had as a student working in kitchens in the United States led Ruizpalacios to conceive his own version for cinema of the fervor that breaks out in the back room of a modern Tower of Babel, in the form of a kitchen, where the dreamer Pedro (Briones) falls in love with Julia (Mara), but when he becomes the suspect of stealing 800 dollars from the till, the situation soon gets out of control.

Ask.

What does a kitchen space represent to you?

Answer.

I worked for a while in a kitchen, first as a dishwasher and then as a waiter.

I developed a fascination and respect for that world, for the rhythm they have.

They are a kind of microcosm, a caste system, very hierarchical.

Shakespeare said that the world is a stage.

For me the world is a kitchen and what I wanted to say is that, that it is a place where there are very marked strata, where people come, work for a while and then leave, almost without saying goodbye.

The film is based on the work of Arnold Wesker, who poses a metaphor for this modern world that we have built for ourselves, where what matters more is productivity, the pace of work than the quality of what we are doing and that the people who They are doing it.

I had the opportunity, when I was doing research for this film, to travel to New York, where I interviewed many undocumented chefs and it was very interesting to see this entire thesis of Wesker's, which is still very current.

Q.

Is

The Kitchen

an allusion to the Tower of Babel?

Is it a kind of reflection of the current immigration crisis that is occurring at the gates of the United States?

A.

There is a joke that the chefs I interviewed make.

They say that in New York there is no Japanese, Italian or Chinese food, everything is Mexican food because they are all made by Mexicans.

New York is this

melting pot

of people from all over, so I was also interested in it being sprinkled with other nationalities.

There are many films on the topic of migration.

It's almost a Mexican genre, but I feel like there are few that deal with what happens after you cross.

Almost all of them end with the crossing, but I was interested in the crossing being almost the prologue.

Is the dream fulfilled or not?

What is the price of sleep?

That's what I was interested in exploring.

The poster 'The Kitchen' (2024). Filmmaker

Q.

The characters, in order not to feel that nostalgia for the distance, seem to be placed inside a great capitalist machine, which subdues them and lets us stop them.

Is there a parallel between how Pedro, a migrant who has been abroad for many years, sees and assimilates his situation versus how Estela, someone who recently arrived, does with respect to these concepts?

A.

Yes, totally.

That's why the movie ends with them.

They are like a mirror, but through time.

Pedro is a migrant who is already broken by the experience, he already has this scar.

Estela is just going to acquire her, she barely made the trip and she has just arrived and so that is why it was important to start the film with her and in some way play with the audience and her expectations about the characters.

At the beginning there is a phrase by Henry David Thoreau that says: 'What infinite noise.

I wake up almost every night to the mechanical wheezing of the locomotive.

It interrupts my dreams.'

Wesker's work is that.

Where is the man in the middle of the gears of online production?

Where is the soul?

Have we left room for her?

And if not, what is the price?

And is the price paid very expensive?

So, yeah, but to me, that's one of the big themes of the movie.

Q.

A large part of the limelight falls on Raúl Briones and Rooney Mara.

However, each character in the film has a voice and contribution to the plot.

What was it like to handle this experience of an ensemble film?

A.

It's complex, really.

From the script it is always very difficult to see that you are doing justice to each one.

There is a lesson that I really like, it comes from opera, and it is that even the servant has his moment.

Even the character who is most on the edge needs the moment in which the camera is with him, he has to feel alive, full, three-dimensional.

It was a job of taking great care of that in the script, of rewriting and rewriting.

My background as an actor helped me a little.

Always when I write, every part acted.

I try to see the story, even if it's just for that moment, from this character's point of view.

That helps do it justice.

And then, of course, there are the actors.

And what we did with this film was a period of rehearsals.

So, it was very important to me that everyone felt alive, that everyone knew exactly who their character was and what their relationship was with the others.

Q.

The film does not fall into commonplaces regarding racism in the United States, since we see that not only “a gringo” can exercise violence, but also the Mexican himself...

A.

For me it is very important to transcend this melodramatic simplification that gringos are bad and Mexicans are good.

That's not the case, things are much more complex.

Racism has no nationality.

Like violence, sadly, is something we are all capable of.

I think that the moment you portray the migrant, or the Mexican, as a saint, then you take away their humanity.

You steal agency and humanity, so also for me to portray that is important.

Q.

The kitchen

is full of metaphors, not only in the dialogues, but also within the visual construction it makes, of this idea of ​​introducing the viewer to the bowels of the system, which is reflected in this sequence shot of almost a quarter of an inch. hour he does.

What was it like to translate this concept into the visual section?

A.

The purpose of the film was to portray what happens behind the scenes, what we almost never see and what happens behind the doors where our food comes out.

All the energy was put into that from the beginning.

That specific sequence shot required a lot of energy, a lot of practice.

All the actors took very serious cooking classes for a long time until they each managed to become chefs.

Each one really knew how to do what their station had to do.

So first, we actually created a restaurant and then we did it for the camera.

There are two stages, one as complex as the other.

Once they know how to make tortellini or chicken marsala, how do we make it look cool for the camera?

And yes, it was a process of a week and a half that we spent filming just that sequence.

And it was a lot of rehearsal.

It's like putting together a choreography.

It is a dance with 50 characters, not extras, they were apart.

So, yeah, it was super complex, but a lot of fun.

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