WORLD PREMIERE @ 2018 L’ETRANGE FESTIVAL, PARIS FRANCE.

2019 FICUNAM - IN COMPETITION, MEXICO CITY

2019 ECRÃ FESTIVAL, BRAZIL

2020 CHICAGO LATINO FILM FESTIVAL, VIRTUAL / CHICAGO, USA.

Amalia is the story of a woman who has recently lost her mother and is trying to manage her  grief when she learns that her partner has been having an affair. His mysterious death only days later sends her into a spiraling obsession with his mistress.  All the while on this quest for answers, whispers and bizarre sightings start to bleed into her scrappy existence, luring her to an alternate reality that may or may not hold the answers. (from Christine Davila, “8 Movies Made by Latinos to Watch Out for in 2018”

El negro es el color más triste; Amalia, de Omar Rodríguez-López

Por Sofía Ochoa Rodríguez

https://ficunam.unam.mx/el-negro-es-el-color-mas-triste-amalia-de-omar-rodriguez-lopez/

Black is the saddest and most enigmatic color in Amalia, the fourth feature film by musician, composer, producer, writer, actor, and director Omar Rodríguez-López. Following the premiere of Los chidos (2012), the filmmaker suffered the loss of his mother, while his producer and editor, Adam Thomson, lost his father. It is precisely this state of grief, born from mourning the death of a mother, that sets the events of this film into motion.

The depths of affliction experienced by the protagonist, played by Denise Dorado, unfold in dark grays—predominantly nocturnal—in a journey of self-destruction. Life and death, the border city of El Paso (where both the director and the lead actress grew up), the interplay of American and Mexican cultures, the seamless switching between Spanish and English, drugs, alcohol, reality, and madness—all create a sense of motion, a trance-like state that intensifies with Amalia’s increasingly reckless attempts to escape her reality. Matters grow even more tangled in a Shakespearean-tinged tragedy, where the obsessive need to uncover the truth—common to those who see themselves as victims but refuse to confront their own complexity and responsibility—ultimately transforms us into the very thing we most despise.

Amalia allows us to explore the heart of a family plagued by machismo and dogmatism, like so many others, but with a rare intensity and fury. If Rodríguez-López shares anything with his protagonist, it is an uncompromising commitment to his own obsessions. For him, form is never an obstacle. He charges forward, defying cinematic influences and narrative conventions—traditional or otherwise—taking what he needs to say what he wants. His style, increasingly refined, relies on his greatest strengths: sound design, music, and an unshakable confidence in the power of his vision. Bold and untamed, Amalia is filmmaking in its most guerrilla form.

L’Etrange Festival 2018 – Compte-rendu ] Partie 1

par Olivier Rossignot

https://www.culturopoing.com/cinema/dossiers-hommages-cinema/letrange-festival-compte-rendu-partie-1/20180909

(TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH)

Seven years after Los Chidos—a kind of Mexican Ugly, Dirty and Bad fueled by a sharp sense of the absurd—Omar Rodríguez-López returns this year with Amalia, an extraordinary journey into the depths of madness that loses the viewer in its mental labyrinth.

While the question "Must a film be understandable to be successful and loved?" may spark endless debate, Amalia can be seen as an altar of mystery, drawing its infinite beauty from shadows, ambiguity, and the absence of answers.

We follow Amalia, drifting in her car through the nocturnal streets of El Paso as if she were wandering through her own mind. It is suggested that since the death of her mother and former partner, Amalia is no longer quite the same—she lets herself go, lulled by radio broadcasts filled with talk of evil and apocalypse… and eventually encounters the monster in a bush.

She relives the same moments over and over; the creature speaks to her in sequences where the filmmaker burns the image with blinding solarization: the darkness is inverted, overexposed by a dazzling star. The further the film progresses, the more it becomes clear that no one can help her—she is alone in the world, torn apart.

Where is reality, and what is hallucination? The filmmaker never answers, plunging the viewer into a state of constant uncertainty—and paradoxically, it is this sustained dual interpretation, this fragile boundary, that makes Amalia the most fantastical film of this festival. Whether or not the supernatural is merely a reflection of an inner landscape matters little; it remains, nonetheless, a vast cosmic space.

By offering a splendidly Lovecraftian film, Omar Rodríguez-López shows that he has truly captured (a rare feat) the poetic essence of the American writer. As with the author of Dagon, the cannibalistic monster evokes ancient gods, the necessity of sacrifice, the end times—expressed in velvety, cryptic phrases that lull both the viewer and the heroine into a strange melody.

Visually, the film even openly references Alberto Breccia’s adaptations of the Cthulhu Mythos, with a black and white that is abstract, cloudy, nebulous—an atmosphere of swarming labyrinths, spiraling vapors, and intangible, almost gaseous essences that reveal more than they show. Fear here arises directly from an image that has lost its illustrative quality, from its inability to define itself as an object. The famous "unspeakable"? It’s right here. The image conveys sensation: a hum, a viscous or festering texture—without ever clearly showing what it is we're seeing.

The only film comparable to Amalia might be Eraserhead, which also created that same fusion between visual experimentation and nightmare, where the fantastic becomes an individual odyssey. We follow Amalia much like Henry Spencer, tormented by the monstrosity of a city and its outer edges, in a contemporary world that has become eschatological.

Yet, Omar Rodríguez-López’s film leans even more toward the dizzying portrait of a crack that keeps widening—a heroine who builds her own monsters. Amalia is more a hypnotic wandering than a strictly narrative work, carried by masterful direction and sound design. The music, blending electric tones and Mexican sounds, induces a constant sense of drift. The astonishingly undefined, deeply dark cinematography mirrors Amalia’s psyche and forces us to identify shapes ourselves, to participate in the construction of meaning.

And the city passes by—at night, deserted and pallid, lit by sorrowful streetlights—as Amalia roams, growling, speaking to herself or to the car radio that seems to answer her. Long ago, she left the shores of this world and docked in another, one only she knows exists. A figure of despair, she already has one foot in the abyss.

Amalia is a film that must be earned; it may not be the most accessible of works, but it will be difficult to find one more beautiful.
(O.R)

New Horror Film by Omar Rodríguez López, ‘Amalia,’ Premieres in Paris

By: Jasmine Aguilera

PARIS — A theater of Parisians gathered to watch a film littered with border slang and iconography at the world premiere of “Amalia,” a new horror film by At The Drive-In and The Mars Volta guitarist, Omar Rodríguez López.

In it, the border city of El Paso, Texas, plays as much a character as the story lead, Amalia, a woman experiencing homelessness, drug addiction, and an obsession with her late husband’s mistress that spirals out of control.

Rodríguez López and his long-time producer and editor, Adam Thomson, put the cast and crew together within eight days, moved everyone in to Rodríguez López’s house and filmed in the dead of night over the course of three chaotic weeks. “Amalia” premiered at L’Etrange Festival in Paris on September 8, and showed again on September 13.

This is not the first film Rodríguez López has made, but it’s the first since his indie flick “Los Chidos” premiered in 2012.

“I didn’t make anything for five years,” he said. “It wasn’t a decision on my part, I wanted to make something, but that just wasn’t the case.”

After his mother died in 2012, Rodríguez López said he struggled with his creativity. But he said things changed after a chance encounter with a spiritual man in Mexico City in late 2016.

“That was the beginning of a process where something inside of me just let go,” he said. “I felt like I was a ripe fruit and someone had just taken a bite out of me.”

And so Rodríguez López began writing “Amalia” in what he describes as a two-week writing fury. Then he called Thomson, who is based in New York City, and he immediately wanted in on the project. Rodríguez López and Thomson called friends throughout El Paso, Ciudad Juárez and Mexico City, and within eight days they had a crew, a cast, a small budget and a plan to begin filming in January 2017.

“This was my fifth project with Omar. By the fifth project you understand the method to the madness,” Thomson said. “Like, we don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re okay with that. There’s a lot you’re able to pull out of a crew when you’re thrown into a chaotic shoot.”

Actress Denise Dorado quit her job in Los Angeles as a show host to take on the role of Amalia in El Paso, where she’s from.

“[Rodríguez López] asked me if I would be available to do this. I immediately called my manager and she wasn’t very impressed with the project,” Dorado said. “To me there was no question, I would lose money to work on something like this. I called back and told him I was in.”

The entire cast and crew moved into Rodríguez López’s house during the weeks of shooting, which is a normal thing for the director, who said he works on every project this way.

“It’s a positive way to form a symbiotic relationship,” he said. “We need each other in order to succeed at what we do.”

Most scenes in the film were shot at night, and many were outdoors. Some locations became unavailable at the last minute, so plans would change to shoot a different scene. But the overall chaos of the shoot was embraced by the cast and crew. For Dorado, the chaos helped her stay in character.

“I had to keep myself in a state of perpetual hopelessness and rage,” she said. “At the end of the day when you’re working with a director that has a vision and you want to tell a story and you’re just thrust into the situation in my case, it’s like whatever means necessary. Whatever I have to do to get myself there.”

Rodríguez López admitted there are things in the film that are niche El Paso. The use of Spanglish, subtle references to Chicos Tacos, “Chuco” culture, and El Paso slang were translated with French subtitles for the film’s premiere.

“That post part is so much up to chance,” Rodríguez López said. “For example, in every outdoor shot, Juárez is in the background. Simple things like that, charged with meaning, will be lost on someone in Hamburg.”

Still, Thomson, Dorado, and several of the crew who were able to attend said the premiere in Paris was a success.

“It means a lot to us,” Thomson said. “[L’Etrange] is a filmmaker’s festival. Some other fests can get lost in the glamor, but this fest was super focused on the approach to filmmaking.”

Rodríguez López and Thomson said there are plans to show the film at other festivals and theaters around the world, including in El Paso.

“I wasn’t looking to make another film,” Rodríguez López said. “But when you have an impulse like that, you know you have to follow through. It’s like tunnel vision, you just start to make it happen.”

“Amalia”, film ambitieux aux effets un peu décevants

PAR Geoffrey Nabavian

https://toutelaculture.com/cinema/etrange-festival-2018-amalia-film-ambitieux-aux-effets-decevants/

(TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH)

Faced with this dramatic and experimental thriller by the former guitarist of The Mars Volta, disappointment may arise: by blending social commentary, police drama, and mystical themes—sprinkled with somewhat heavy-handed effects—it results in a mix that feels lacking in breath.

It’s not easy to talk about Amalia, mostly because the film was pitched as a powerful, unforgettable object just before its screening. So we’ll stick to offering a purely personal impression in writing. Amalia begins intriguingly: shot in black and white, it follows a young woman from El Paso (the Amalia of the title) navigating her life—between a family involved in shady dealings, a loyal best friend, alcohol, drugs, and religious celebrations. Also featured: a lover.

There are many ellipses, the editing builds mystery, and the tone grabs attention. The aforementioned lover dies—accidentally or by suicide, no one knows. At his funeral, Amalia notices a hard-faced young woman she had previously seen in her late lover’s apartment. She grows closer to this mysterious and unsettling woman, Tania, and eventually becomes her lover. But the surrounding instability and this unexpected relationship soon begin to disrupt the film’s atmosphere.

Three Ingredients, But Little Breath

Directed by Omar Rodríguez-López (former guitarist of The Mars Volta and director of Los Chidos, a film highly praised at L’Étrange Festival a few years ago), and presented in the International Competition at L’Étrange Festival 2018 (where the more accomplished The Dark was also screened), Amalia is not limited to realism and dramatic thriller—it also weaves in mystical elements. Alongside scenes of religious celebration are sequences where a strange spirit speaks to the heroine, seemingly dictating an inflexible path, including commanding her to “completely possess” her new lover, Tania.

Fair enough. For a while, the unusual material keeps the viewer intrigued. The problem is that these mixed elements don’t produce a very gripping result.

While the social realism feels accurate and the thriller pacing might hold interest—with well-portrayed characters—the mystical thread falls flat: the effects used to convey it are heavy-handed and obscure, and the spirit’s voice delivers only platitudes wrapped in an unconvincing pseudo-poetic style. Moreover, the whole blend ultimately seems to tell a story that’s rather familiar, dressed up in a vaguely mysterious aesthetic. “This must have symbolic meaning—you figure it out…” the images seem to say. But that meaning remains elusive. The thriller-drama plot doesn’t offer anything particularly original or groundbreaking.

Upon reflection, one might conclude that the meaning is this: by following the strange Tania, the heroine Amalia has, perhaps, married herself to death. The spirit demanding things of her would thus be a personification of death… But if that’s the intended takeaway, it’s delivered with such heaviness that it barely registers. Poorly balanced in its effects, Amalia is a film that seems to buckle under the weight of its ambition, which is not effectively brought to life on screen. Its music, though original, is not used to its full potential; its lead actress, Denise Dorado, while brilliant, and its direction, competent but marred by those cursed effects, can’t do much to sustain engagement over time.

Amalia, a film by Omar Rodríguez-López, starring Denise Dorado.
Genre: Thriller / Drama / Experimental.
Runtime: 1h36.
Rated: Not suitable for under 12.