Location: San Francisco, CA (also Mexico City)
Medium: Documentary Film, Experimental Film, Photography
Website: altamurafilms.com
Natalia Almada is a Mexican-American filmmaker and photographer, and the founder of Altamura Films. Born in 1974 in Mexico City, she is the great-granddaughter of Mexico’s 40th president, General Plutarco Elías Calles. She received a BFA from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (2001). She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow — the first Latina filmmaker to receive the award — and a two-time winner of the Sundance Documentary Directing Award (2009 and 2021). She lives and works between San Francisco and Mexico City.
Almada’s films move between documentary, fiction, and experimental narrative, filtering Mexican history, politics, and family memory through a poetic sensibility. She is drawn to the overlap between personal and collective grief — how an individual loss rhymes with a national one. Her work consistently refuses the conventions of journalistic documentary in favor of a slower, more elliptical form of witness. Her films have screened at MoMA, the Guggenheim, and Documenta, and have broadcast on the PBS series POV.
- All Water Has a Perfect Memory (2002) — Experimental short documentary meditating on bicultural memory and family loss; premiered at Sundance; won Best Documentary Short at the inaugural Tribeca Film Festival
- Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side) (2005) — Feature documentary weaving corrido music into a portrait of drug trafficking and migration along the US-Mexico border; broadcast on PBS POV
- El General (The General) (2009) — Feature documentary using her grandmother’s recollections to examine the legacy of General Plutarco Elías Calles; won the Sundance Documentary Directing Award; broadcast on PBS POV
- El Velador (The Night Watchman) (2011) — Observational documentary following a night watchman at a Mexican mausoleum for the country’s most infamous drug lords; premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight; screened at MoMA and the Guggenheim; broadcast on PBS POV
- Users (2021) — Poetic meditation on technology, parenthood, and mortality; won the Sundance Documentary Directing Award for the second time; distributed by Icarus Films
- 2021 — Users, Sundance Film Festival (Directing Award)
- 2016 — Todo lo demás (Everything Else), New York Film Festival; nominated for a Mexican Academy Award (Ariel)
- 2011 — El Velador, Cannes Directors’ Fortnight; New Directors/New Films (MoMA/Film at Lincoln Center); Documenta 13
- 2009 — El General, Sundance Film Festival (Directing Award)
- 2008 — El General, Whitney Biennial; Munich International Film Festival
- 2015 — Artist residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito
- MacArthur Fellow (2012); Guggenheim Fellow (2008); USA Artists Award (2010); Alpert Award (2021); Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow (2018)
- Featured on Art21
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