One of world cinema’s most significant talents to emerge this decade, Carlos Reygadas has crafted three arresting and ambitious features that place him firmly in a lineage of such transcendental-minded filmmakers as Dreyer, Bresson and Tarkovsky — noble company, indeed. The jury prize winner at Cannes last year, Silent Light (see On Screen page 18) is both his most fully realized effort and his most moving. A trio of non-professional actors (including Canadian author Miriam Toews) star as the three points in a painful love triangle, their emotional strife taking on a starkly elemental quality due to the film’s unusual setting: a Mennonite community in Mexico. The 37-year-old lawyer turned filmmaker spoke with EYE WEEKLY when Silent Light had its North American premiere at TIFF last September.

How did you become interested in Mennonite communities?
When I was a boy, I would go with my father when he went geese hunting in central Mexico. Very often, Mennonites living in that part of Mexico would be our guides. So I was very attracted to their clothing and their physical appearance. Their skin was very white, and then with all the sun, the cold and the dust, they become old at a really young age — they really look powerful and charged. I did some travelling five years ago and I had this story in my mind about a love triangle. I passed through these Mennonite communities and I realized they would be the perfect setting because basically they are a monolithic community — they are without any social or economic classes, without even preconceived notions of beauty. There wouldn’t be all of those things that would come into effect if I had placed the movie in Mexico City or New York City. I just wanted to keep the archetypes. Even the language was important for me in that sense because I wanted to keep the objectiveness and neutrality of subtitling, since very few people speak their language.

It’s remarkable how you can cull such powerful performances from non-actors — how did you find them?
I didn’t know the people in the community. After I wrote the screenplay, I started looking for the characters. This is not the kind of casting you do in an office — you do it in the countryside, in the restaurants they have by the highways, just by moving around. With Miriam Toews, I saw her picture in the jacket of her book A Complicated Kindness and I thought she was perfect for a role so I chased after her. The question with casting is fascinating when you work with non-actors because there’s a connection that you feel, an organic thing that just makes it click. At that point, once I’ve found the person who fits, then I have to adapt the character to that person. At that point, I stop being interested in the character and I start being interested in the person.

Another thing that’s striking about these characters is their fundamental decency. Why aren’t there more movies about nice people?
I don’t know. If you look at soap operas in Mexico, for example, you really see bad people. Some people might be like that — some are even worse — but in general terms, people are not as evil as that. The same thing in movies: people kill everyone, chase after each other, break people’s faces for no reason. It’s as if we’re not interested in good people. In my films, people tend to be honest, or would like to be honest if they had the tools. I like the fact that in the end they are all searching for love, often in their own failing ways. It’s easier to have these guys killing people for no reason than for people to be loving, honest and truthful. I believe life is just trying to be like the best version of yourself every moment. You fail, certainly, but you try again.

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