Art director Eugenio Caballero (Mexico City, 52 years old) says he feels sad these days about the decision of the American network NBC to remove the platforms from streaming the documentary Separated, a criticism of the immigration policies of Donald Trump’s first administration, after the US elections in November. The Oscar winner for his work in Pan’s Labyrinththe film by Guillermo del Toro, criticizes the network and believes that if the work had been released before Americans voted, the film could have generated some type of reaction among voters. “Everything adds up,” says Caballero. “I’m not innocent either. I know that things move in other ways, but what we, as artists, have is to be able to express in our work what we believe about these things,” he adds.
Caballero has worked on the production design of Separated by the famous American film director Errol Morris. It is the first time that he has collaborated with a documentary filmmaker and he has done so to recreate the story of a family, mother and son, who are separated when crossing the northern border of Mexico in the midst of Trump’s harsh and criticized immigration policies. The work was premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will soon be released on platforms in the US, but Caballero regrets that an opportunity has been lost to open the eyes of some American who could still correct their vote. “The issue is part of Trump’s agenda, this draconian approach to migration and the southern border. The horror of what happened is so evident, whose ultimate goal was not to contain migration, but to harm children as a method of persuasion,” explains the artist in an interview at his home in Mexico City, in the middle of a patio. fresco full of plants and a giant tree that the residents of this capital neighborhood call “thunders.” Remember the Buendía tree, in the television version of the famous novel One hundred years of lonelinessby the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, on which Caballero worked.
Separated —which does not yet have a release date in Mexico—follows the mother and her son as they leave Guatemala, cross Mexico with all the dangers that this territory implies for migrants, cross the northern border and are detained and separated by the authorities. Americans. “It is a brutal topic, very hard to see. Morris, who is one of the most respected documentary directors in the world, has a very unique style in which he recreates part of the journey of this family and not only focusing on interviews, which is his specialty, with officials directly involved in the program. of separation and then reunification of the migrants,” says Caballero. The art director states that the story impacted him from the long research process. “There are very few images of these centers where children were separated. They are detention centers in horrendous conditions. For me it was very shocking to see how the road to get to the United States is an absolute dispossession, little by little everything is taken away from them. And with this Trump policy, dispossession reaches the ultimate consequences, which is taking a child from his mother or father,” he says. “They are detained, they don’t speak the language, they have nothing to hold on to. What that policy did was create state orphans,” he says.
Caballero, who has collaborated with the three great Mexican film directors (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro), is sure that Trump will continue with harsh policies against migrants, as he has promised. “If, despite how monstrous it was, he is re-elected and has a belligerent speech towards migration, there are no laws in the United States that prevent this from happening again,” he warns. Trump won the elections with a shocking majority, with many votes, even in states considered moderate, so can artists generate a change in people with their works? “Art should be nothing,” Caballero responds. “You cannot give art a utilitarian issue. I am interested in the position of certain artists on these issues. I feel like we all do our jobs from different trenches. There are people who get much more involved and are social fighters, others do it through journalism, there are people who protest. It is up to us artists to somehow evoke it and try, through our work, to propose a position,” alleges the artist.
Caballero’s filmography includes thirty films in which he has worked with other internationally recognized directors such as the Spanish Juan Antonio Bayona, with whom he collaborated on the feature film Impossible, the shocking recreation of the tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004 and left tens of thousands of dead. The film, which earned Naomi Watts an Oscar nomination for best actress, earned Caballero a nomination for the Goya Spanish Film Awards. The Mexican also created the evocative art design of the award-winning film Romaby Cuarón, which won three awards from the American Film Academy for the director: best direction, best foreign film and best photography. Caballero won his own statuette in 2005 for best production design for Pan’s Labyrinth. How does it feel to win an Oscar? “Nerves,” he says without false modesty. “I won the Oscar when I was very young, I was 33 years old. It was not the culmination of a career, but a moment that at first I did not understand. I feel like it took me years to understand the real weight and the added value that one wants to give it. It is true that the Oscar has brought greater job opportunities, but I don’t think there is a need to accumulate awards. I understand awards as a consequence of a job well done or that connects with people. For me, that’s where the coolest thing is,” he reasons.
The production designer is also now collaborating with two Argentine and Spanish films and has released two Netflix hits, the film versions of Pedro Paramothe celebrated novel by Mexican Juan Rulfo, and by One hundred years of loneliness. The works, which have involved immense production work, have received harsh criticism from specialized voices in cinema and the media, which Caballero, he affirms, does not worry about. “When we get into material like this we always know it’s going to be difficult. When I was invited five years ago, I proposed a rigorous path to do it. People may or may not like the series, but there is research behind it, there is construction, sets created from scratch, with great rigor. You would be paralyzed if you focused on opinions, because criticism is not exclusive to these adaptations. With Roma There was a group of people who destroyed us, and it is a film that I really like. With Pan’s Labyrinth The reviews were, at first, terrible,” he says.
The creator is optimistic about the health of Mexican cinema, which, he says, is a powerful industry despite the blow caused by the covid-19 pandemic and the budget cuts under the administrations of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the current president. Claudia Sheinbaum. “We have never had such a large production period,” he says. “More than 200 films are being made a year. When I started making films it seemed like a utopia, because six films were made a year throughout Mexico. It was impossible to dedicate yourself to this,” he points out. “There are a lot of important and diverse voices that tell the stories that are happening to us and that are moving us, from the most commercial cinema to documentaries that are very hard to watch, that reflect what is happening in Mexico. There is a very great technical and artistic development. There is a professionalization in Mexico that is radically different. Every year I watch twenty movies that I like. The batting average is higher than in many places,” certifies the acclaimed Mexican artist.