In Times of Rain

In Times of Rain (Itandehui Jansen, 2018) is a feature film inspired by my own migration from a rural community to the city when I was an 11-year-old boy. This is not an autobiographical narrative but it does try to convey different aspects of the migration of children and teenagers from rural communities to urban centres. The film addresses the family separation and explores not only the physical but also the linguistic and cultural distances between generations that result from this migration.

The story of In Times of Rain is focused on three generations: Soledad, a healer in the Mixtec community; Adela, Soledad’s daughter who migrated to the city; and José, Adela’s son, who is about to join his mother in the city. Soledad, the healer and grandmother, speaks in Mixtec and Spanish. Adela, by contrast, prefers to speak only in Spanish. I opted for this contrast in the script to incite a reflection about the impact of economic migration on language and cultural heritage. Alejandra Herrera, the actress who plays the role of Adela, felt that her character could speak in Mixtec again when she returned to her hometown. During filming, we adapted the dialogue lines, originally written in Spanish, to Mixtec for the scene where Adela returns to town. I helped the actress with her pronunciation for these lines. The final version of the film thus includes to variants of Mixtec, that of San Miguel el Grande (Ángeles Cruz) and that of Nochixtlán (me).

I initially wrote the script in my own language and later translated it to Spanish. The majority of the scenes in Mixtec refer to activities performed by the character of Soledad as a healer and they have a ceremonial quality. For instance, there is a scene where Soledad performs a healing ritual. Healing rituals in Mixtec usually include some specific phrases. In another scene Soledad “reads” corn kernels to understand what the future brings. Though corn reading used to be a common practice among the Mixtec it no longer is. I thus partially relied on ethnographic research on similar practices in the Mixe region. In a different scene Soledad prays in the church for her daughter. While this is a personal prayer, one would expect Soledad’s language to be ceremonial in such a context. To convey this, as part of my research for the scriptwriting, I conducted interviews with healers from my community, all of which were spoken in Mixtec. The scenes in Tiempo de lluvia that feature ceremonies and healings were inspired by these interviews but the texts in the film are new. My intention was to create a fictional character with a language of her own that would still be respectful to the knowledge of the healers I interviewed. I therefore refused to literally adapt the texts that they had shared with me.

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The character of Soledad was initially conceived for actress Ángeles Cruz, a Mixtec native. However, the dialectical variant of Mixtec that she speaks is different from the variant I speak. For this reason the texts in Mixtec that I wrote had to be adapted to the variant of Ángeles. The difference between our variants is such that a translation of the texts was in fact needed. Ángeles thus worked closely with Isabel Sánchez as she knew the ceremonial language of her own region.

Making films has allowed me to experiment with different creative processes. I also think it is important to encourage the cultural and linguistic expression of the indigenous peoples in cinema as well as in other media. To express cultural diversity in cinema will allow us to find a more fruitful dialogue with the concept of a fairer and more equitable society.