Film Show 051: Nicolás Pereda
An interview with the Mexican-Canadian filmmaker about using fiction to organize reality, telling lies to ourselves, and his new feature films 'Lázaro at Night' (2024) and 'Copper' (2025)
Nicolás Pereda
Nicolás Pereda (b. 1982) is a Mexican-Canadian filmmaker who has spent his career constructing works that blur the lines between the real and imagined. Concerned with the prismatic nature of mundanity, his films—methodical, slow-paced, and featuring a stable of regular actors both professional and non-professional—revel in the mysteries and realities of everyday experiences, whether harsh, absurd, humorous, or all three at once. Inspired by the films of Tsai Ming-liang, his works unfold patiently, weaving in biographical elements of both himself and his subjects/actors.
Since his debut feature film, Where Are Their Stories? (2007), Pereda has found ways to navigate the docufiction medium to provide ruminations on contemporary Mexico with regards to poverty, labor, race, bureaucracy, history, memory, and interpersonal relationships. More recently, he’s started to view his works less as documentary and fiction hybrids, and more as products of a certain, unavoidable truth: that fiction is always embedded into the real. His 10th feature film, Lázaro at Night (2024), has its New York theatrical premiere tonight at Metrograph. His newest feature film, Copper (2025), has its North American premiere on September 12th as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Pereda on September 5th, 2025 to discuss his childhood, his new films, and how telling lies to yourself isn’t necessarily bad.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know you were born in Mexico City. What are the earliest memories you have of growing up there—what comes to mind?
Nicolás Pereda: I grew up in a particular area called Coyoacán, where all of the buildings are colonial buildings. It's quite pretty and picturesque—it’s where the Frida Kahlo house is. When tourists go to the city, they tend to go to this area at some point even though it’s removed from the rest of the city. I had a childhood that was quite free, especially for a city that is so dense. I would walk around alone when I was 7 or 8 years old, though people don’t do that anymore. I went to a school that was about an hour away by bus. There was a little van that took us there, me and my sister, so I just remember crossing endless concrete buildings to get to school. Those are the biggest memories I have of the city.
I can also say that I remember, at some point, noticing the differences in social class early on. My parents are not rich but they’re academics and artists, so they belong to a middle class that’s very, very small in Mexico. I guess most of the Third World operates similarly, but I remember being really struck by the social differences early on.
Are there any particular experiences that made you aware of this?
An experience that I think a lot of kids have is when they go out to eat in plazas. Kids come and ask for money and if you don’t give them any, they ask for the food you’re eating. And you’re the same age as those kids asking for food. It becomes super complex; you don’t know what to do with that, and you feel somewhat guilty, but you’re also only 7 or 8 years old.
Did you ever have conversations about this stuff with your siblings or parents?
A little bit, but it was mostly with my extended family and not my nuclear family, so my aunts and uncles and cousins. I think we all think of ourselves as progressive, left-wing people who can easily point to where the troubles exist in Mexican society and why they continue. Even then, we see that there is a class of people who are exploited, and these are the people who do work for us. But because our houses are not extravagant and we don’t drive fancy cars, you feel like there must be other people who are the bad guys. I was trying to reflect on the way we oppress a different social class, and it’s also quite palpable. If you’re not from that society and you visit, you can see that there are people who are clearly oppressing others.
You mentioned earlier that when you were 7 or 8 that you were walking around. Do you have any fond experiences of doing that?
Mexico City felt like home. I can’t think of anything specific right now, but it was a vivid experience and I often go back to that area to see my parents. And it still feels like home to me.
When did you first get into the arts? Were there any formative experiences where you recognized what art could do or be? This doesn’t have to relate to film, either.
I never thought I would be an artist or that art even particularly interested me. I think art interested me to some degree because of my family and, since I was a good student, my mom took me to places—I was a quiet kid and I would actually pay attention. At the same time, I wasn’t good at the basic things you tend to be good at when you actually consider art: painting, drawing. I had really bad handwriting, too. I thought I was bad at art, and that distanced me from it for most of my childhood.
When I was 16 or so, I took a small workshop where we made films. We had to shoot on VHS with the big camera, and I started shooting. I enjoyed that process, I enjoyed mixing from one tape to another, but it was really the machinery I got into and not so much the themes or subject matters or ideas, really. It was very tech-y. It didn’t matter what I was filming. And while I think I tried to care, upon reflection I was really only enthralled with the machinery.
Were you always a hands-on person, tinkering with objects and such? Or was that the first time you realized that you liked working with machines?
I always liked little projects. When I was 14 I would paint my bedroom without telling my parents. I liked creating little structures and decorating things in bizarre ways. I remember going to the hardware store by myself when I was little because I wanted to pick up things. My parents wouldn’t know I was doing that stuff. Everything I did came out sort of crooked, too—I’m not a perfectionist at all now and I wasn’t as a kid either. I was just happy to build, even if it didn’t work out so well. I feel the films have that same quality too, to some degree.
What was this film that you made at 16?
It was about a kid with a mental disability who was not exactly aware of it, and it’s because it was a slight disability. It was in first person, so it was a subjective film, and it was about his daily life. It was a mundane thing—he would go on walks. There was also voiceover narration, which was part of the workshop; we had to learn how to record voice and know how to mix, so I did a voiceover and was walking around. It was ambiguous whether this person had a mental disability or not, but you could maybe think that they did.
Do you mind talking about the movies you were watching between the age of 16, when you made this first film, and later in your 20s when your first official films came out? A lot of your early works do feel very of their time—I think about them in relation to other low-budget indie films, in relation to other slow cinema.
I went to film school at 19. I didn’t grow up watching movies, so when I went to film school, I started watching movies obsessively. I remember watching Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? (2001) and feeling like it was something I’d never watched before, and it didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen either. The usual ways of interpreting narrative were just not there. His ideas about story and character development… there was something I didn’t understand, but I was also engaged with the film. That feeling of being connected to something that is so alien to you was really exciting. This idea, where I don’t understand something but am still really engaged with it, made me realize that you don’t always have to understand something. With art, you want some sort of emotional connection, not an understanding. And of course I was moved by his whole aesthetic.
I think I watched all of the things that became fundamental to everything I’ve done up to this point quite early on. There were the films of Tsai, Apichatpong, Fassbinder, Bresson, and then the more canonical films. When I watched Chantal Akerman, there was also this big shift for me. The fact she was working partly in the experimental world and the narrative world, and moving seamlessly from one film to the next, became really important.
You just said that it’s not necessarily important to understand everything. How do you approach films that are documentaries, that skew more non-fiction? I’m thinking about your earliest films, like Where Are Their Stories? (2007) and Interview with the Earth (2008). How important is it that your audience understands the reality of situations and that they hear the complete stories of these people?
When it comes to the work that I do specifically—and this is not necessarily what I think about with all cinema in general—I actually don’t care what information gets transferred to the viewer. By this I mean concrete facts and concrete knowledge. I spend way too much time in my films doing stuff that runs counter to that, that prevents you from understanding. There’s so much information that is lacking in those films that you can’t really have a cohesive understanding of what’s going on. And the films could become too lukewarm if I try to do everything.
The producer of Copper (2025), my latest feature, is my cousin Paula Mónaco. She’s a journalist. And my cinematographer, Miguel Tovar, is also a journalist. I was working with them because I was going to shoot in an area that was a little bit dangerous, and they know the country quite well because they’re always traveling for journalism. They create small documentary pieces, mostly as freelancers; they’ve created stuff for The New York Times and other publications. Their work is the opposite of what I do. It’s very committed and thorough. When I watch their works—and they’re working in spaces that are similar to the ones I work in—I know that what they want is for people to understand that there’s something happening to specific people and that action needs to be taken. Different advocacy groups use their pieces to bring attention to certain problems in society.
I think it’s great that they do that, but… if that were my interest I’d just do that (laughter). I wouldn’t disguise it as art, it would just be the thing I do. In reality, what I’m interested in is capturing the same feeling that Tsai’s movies generated in me, of not understanding what I’m watching but still being engaged. That’s what I’m after. For the films that have some kind of social interest, you still don’t know what’s happening and who these people are. You just get a sense of conflict, and there’s nothing you can do about it either, as a viewer.
Let’s take something like The Palace (2013), then. That film has clearer social messaging than some of your other works—and there are scenes where people are directly talking to the camera, too—but it’s obviously not something a journalist like your cousin would make. What’s the intention you had with that film, and how do you know how much to withhold and present to capture that?
What I withhold and what I present is intuitive. I just present the scenes that I feel have weight, and what that means is also subjective, as I don’t always know what will have weight. We could use the word “pulse,” where I feel there’s something that comes to life. Seeing a girl make a bed is… nothing. But seeing that specific girl make the bed… and I watched her make it, and I thought there was something so interesting about the way she made it, and then you think about how she’s young and doing this task thoroughly and you wonder what this all means. Some of the interviews at the end of the film were more striking than others, and they’re all saying similar things, but then there are some people who have more intensity. To go back to what we were talking about, it is on one hand about a complicated subject matter, and the film clearly has an agenda. But at the same time, it’s quite open; it’s not about a specific space where one should try to intervene.
Sometimes you watch a film about a certain problem and you feel like you really know about the problem and you really know what the solutions are. You have a sense of what you should be doing. With The Palace, it’s this thing where you see this injustice happening, but there is no clear way out. It’s not clear what one should do about it; it doesn’t allow you a place for comfort, in that sense. It doesn’t feel like watching it is part of the solution. This is what I find problematic about some documentaries on social issues: as you watch them, you feel like the act of watching them is part of the resistance. You come out feeling emancipated, as if you have already made the first step in solving this problem. And then you get distracted and forget about it and don’t do anything. You can’t save the whales one day and then watch another doc and go help kids who are working in manufacturing plants.
With The Palace, I wanted to create a sense of this injustice, but you get bored as well. It cannot be exciting or moving—when it is, you start to feel emancipated. It gives you too much hope. You may get upset when watching certain films—there will be these extreme feelings—but I’d rather not generate them. It’s not like you couldn’t just look around and see that injustice is happening everywhere. And the thing is, you may not generate those feelings when doing that, but then you’ll watch something and feel intensely emotional… it’s strange. It would take five minutes to read the news and realize that the world is falling apart. Like, why did you suddenly become so emotional and connected to a certain problem? People have become really good at making these documentaries and manipulating people’s feelings, and I’m trying to resist that.
You mentioned the virtues of boredom. That’s a loaded word that feels inherently negative, but I also think in your films, whenever you have a long take, there is an understanding that boredom can be prismatic. Sometimes, this boredom can reveal itself as something mysterious, as something that provides intrigue. Sometimes it can be meditative or ruminative. I’m curious how you navigate this in your more narrative films as opposed to the works that feel more like documentaries. We can talk about your newest works, Lázaro at Night (2024) and Copper (2025).
I’m particularly interested in the mundane. The mundane is strange because it ultimately encompasses everything. Sometimes the mundane is extremely boring. We can think of boredom and entertainment as being on opposite poles, but neither are good or bad things—they can both be deep or shallow. The mundane for me tends to be interesting because I find that a lot of comedy exists in a way where the feeling is not shared by all of the participants. We’ve all been in situations where you see an interaction and find it funny but the person next to you doesn’t think it’s funny, as it depends on your idiosyncrasies and what you perceive. It happens all the time—the mundane is filled with these bizarre and funny situations. And sometimes you want to laugh but it’d be awkward to do so because people are just doing their thing.
I’ve been in situations at the bank where the banker’s trying to offer me something and the way they’re doing it is hilarious. I have to contain my laughter, though, because for him it’s just a normal interaction. The other day I went to buy a washing machine and the way she was selling it to me… at one point it was so ridiculous. I went with my sister and I was just looking at her and tearing up because I thought it was so funny, but this was in a department store and there were other people around selling things, and it was just a natural thing for these people. I like this space where situations can be, depending on your perception, really boring or really funny, or perhaps really complex in relation to social dynamics. To some degree, you see what you wanna see. Sometimes it’s clear what my agenda is, but sometimes you can be really lost if there is nothing you perceive, or if you’re attuned to something that I’m not aware of.
You said in an interview in the early 2010s that you like working with non-professional actors and not giving them instructions because what naturally happens is that they start talking about their own experiences and lives. Has the way you approached working with actors changed throughout the course of your career? Obviously we could talk about Gabino Rodríguez, who you’ve worked with since your debut, but I’m wondering more broadly if your philosophy on working with actors has evolved. We can talk about this in light of Lázaro at Night given that the film is about actors.
At the time, I was much more interested in the possibilities of documentary-fiction hybrids; I was working with both professional and non-professional actors and mixing them together. I was also thinking about the lives of both professional and non-professional actors, thinking about how their own lives can impact the film.
I think when I said that quote, I was probably writing the film Greatest Hits (2012). The second part of the film has my uncle playing a character, but he’s really playing himself and telling stories of his own life. Also at the same time, earlier in the film, there is a father who is an actor but he’s also the father of Gabino in real life. At some point they talk a little bit about their own private lives, of Gabino’s mom dying and how he dealt with it. I was interested in these intersections between the lives of these people and their characters. The characters will suddenly shift into the actor and then back into the character, and you weren’t sure if you were looking at a documentary subject or a fictional character.
What’s happened over the years is quite simple, actually. I’m interested in the actor’s ability to be comfortable with their own movements, within their own skin, without feeling the need to perform. In a superficial sense, I like that the actors I work with don’t have to create or put on a different body for the film. They’re able to move, breathe, and talk in the same way they would without the camera. Their character is not them, but everything else is them. It’s almost as if they’re not acting, but at the same time they’re not playing themselves, but they’re also playing a version of themselves. When I see how they laugh and move, it’s not like they’re rehearsing it beforehand, and they’re not coming up to me afterwards, asking if it looks or sounds okay.
And this is how I think about the documentary element in my films now. They’ve become so entrenched in fiction, so the documentary nature comes from the biographical elements of the actors. Gabino changed his name to Lázaro, so now he’s Lázaro. When I was writing that screenplay, I thought it was funny because we all had this problem remembering his name and we were correcting ourselves. We would correct other people too, because it was like a dead name. It was solemn, this whole idea, but we were like… why is this so solemn? He’s just playing around, he just changed his name, and there’s not that much at stake. We can make fun of it. Or with Paco [Francisco Barreiro], he acted in a TV show called Narcos: Mexico and I took that persona and used it. So there are these biographical elements that seep into the films.
In a very practical sense, working with the same people means that we don’t talk about what I expect of them. I just give them the screenplay and they do what they do. Sometimes I tell them things, but most of the time, we’re already at a place where we’re in sync. They don’t doubt that what they’re doing is what I want from them.
Was there a reason for the name change to Lázaro?
When he was around 34 years old—he’s 42 now, so this was 8 years ago—he told me and some other people that he thought 35 would be the halfway point of his life. He decided that he wanted to live a different life at 35; and that the life he lived up until this point was fine but he had gotten bored and wanted to become a new person. It all seemed kind of abstract, but then he changed his name, got plastic surgery, and changed his face. In person it’s super striking, and the first time I saw him with his new face I thought it was really crazy. I’ve gotten used to it now, but I don’t know if it’s so obvious in the films. Lázaro at Night was the first film with his new face, and perhaps it’s not so striking, but to me it was like filming a new person.
He framed it as an artistic project. He’s mainly a theater director and an actor for plays. His main interest in life is fiction and specifically fiction in the everyday. Before, he was interested in this fiction as a prankster. He would tell his dad that he moved to Tijuana when he really moved to Amsterdam and would write as if he actually did. He would have games like that. He would engage with friends in fictional ways. In fact, when he changed his face, nobody believed him. He would write to people and tell them he did this, but we all thought it was a prank. His jokes were all harmless.
I like his commitment to fiction because, for him, fiction is life. It’s not like there’s the real and then there’s the fiction on the side. The real is just a fiction that we create for ourselves. We come up with different arrangements for life, and we find that it’s just the natural course of things. But these arrangements are what we can call fiction. I enjoy that way of thinking: that fiction is just a way to organize the real. We don’t choose most of the organizations of the real—we go to school because we’re told to, we have jobs and have meetings because that’s just what we do. But all those ways of organizing are artificial. It’s important to differentiate between fiction and lies. It’s not like you’re lying when there’s a fiction, especially when you have an understanding that it is a fiction.
So anyways, I’m interested in the way he thinks about life and how it links to fiction, and this also goes back to the question of where documentary went in my work. After so many years, I stopped thinking of the films as documentary-fiction hybrids. I started thinking about how the fictional has a lot to do with the real, and I don’t want to lose that connection.
What was it like to work with him for Lázaro at Night and Copper? He said that he wanted to have a new life, so I’m wondering if you were pushing him in specific ways. This also feels at odds with what you said about working with the same actor and how there’s this sort of unspoken understanding of what should be done. It can seem, in some sense, like a bad thing as you may not be pushed in different directions.
I think I’m pushing myself in different ways. The filmmaking is going into spaces that I hadn’t done before, and I’m trying to think about sound in a new way. But my relationship with him and also Paco, Luisa [Pardo], and Tere [Sánchez] is one where I give them a lot of freedom. Maybe it’ll change, but I like that right now, I can experiment with things and they can do things, and then I can observe how they enter the films. They’re collaborators; they have their own agency. I’m very tyrannical with regards to almost everything in any film, but not with regards to them. They just do what they do, and most of the time I like it
His transformation is a project that takes over his entire life, whereas the films are just asterisks. They’re very small in his whole project of transformation, and he has become a new person in some ways, but the changes are more subtle; I wouldn’t be able to perceive them if we weren’t close. It’s funny because his plays haven’t changed that much. They have a theater group and they’ve been doing plays for like 20 years. The plays are still in the same vein, so I think artistically, I think he wishes that he transformed his art—his face—even more. I think he’s very difficult to change artistically, too.
You eventually start finding the things you like, the things that make you vibrate. And to be able to generate that level of excitement with something new is difficult. It can be artificial. That excitement of finding something takes time, and you can’t just replicate it, you have to shift the way you make things. If you don’t find that excitement, it’s difficult to continue making. What makes artists continue is this certain fire you have, but it’s not just a weird, ambiguous fire—it has to do with very specific things that excite you. Once you find them you don’t want to let go because it’s so easy to lose the will to continue making work.
Not a lot of people watch these films, they don’t have repercussions in the world, and it’s almost like a ridiculous endeavor when you think about the spectatorship landscape. One time we were making a film and Lázaro asked me, “How many people do you think will watch this?” I was like, “I don’t know, maybe with good distribution there will be 30,000 people or so,” which is quite ambitious. And then he said, “Look at this TikTok, it has 2,000,000 views and was made this morning.” (laughter). I was like, “Fuck off!” You feel the ridiculousness of these endeavors. We’re not trying to change the world, we’re just part of a community of artists and perhaps as a small group, it can make a difference, but we’re really just like one bee in a hive. If one bee disappears, the hive still goes on. And you can view your art in the same way. So the only way to continue is to be really enamored with what you do. And that’s why it’s so difficult to let go of things you find that really move you.
You were talking earlier about fiction as a way to organize reality. Do you mind talking about the reasons behind having the Aladdin story in Lázaro at Night?
I was thinking about the first part of the film, and then I listened to this lecture by an Argentinian writer, César Aira. He’s very prolific, and he’s older now but he’s written millions of books—they’re kind of short. He was writing about realism and was talking about the story of Aladdin and I was really engaged with the talk and his ideas. Sometimes the way I write films has to do with collage—you have different elements and they don’t seem to fit, but then you make them fit and see what happens. In a sense, there was no rational reason as to why Aladdin should be in the film (laughter), and I tried to find a way to make it possible—even then, I had to push the pieces together pretty hard since they’re from different worlds. It’s an interpretation more than the driving force of the film.
In the first part of Lázaro at Night, the characters have a problem with their desire. They’re characters who have been left out of artistic life—they’re in their 40s, they hardly do the things that they wanted to do when they were younger. Clearly, they haven’t managed to become actors or writers properly. Also, the love and desire between them feels very cold and difficult; it’s unclear how they care about one another. It’s unclear how they think they care about one another. Luisa is quite hostile to both of them, and they seem unfazed by their relationship with Luisa. These are people who have trouble understanding their desires, and when I wrote it, I was in that world. I was feeling strange about my own desires and whether fulfilling them would actually make me feel any better.
In Spanish, the word for wish is the same as desire—deseo. So what the genie grants Aladdin, in Spanish, are three desires. “What do you desire?” I like this idea that the characters in the beginning have a difficult time with desire and fulfilling them, and then in the second part, the desires are just granted. And when the desires are given, he just chooses food. These are bare necessities, as opposed to those in the first part who wanted it all. There’s something wise about Aladdin because he perhaps doesn’t want to change his way of life because it’s comfortable; he just wants a little help to maintain it.
While watching it, I also thought, Aladdin’s life is kind of boring (laughter). I grew up in a capitalist world in which I’ve been told since I was a baby that I should desire things and fight for them. I was taught that life should be a series of improvements, where you get better and eventually have more, but Aladdin was written in a pre-capitalist time. The way I tell the whole Aladdin story is the way the beginning of the original tale is written. For the longest time, Aladdin is just ordering food and going back in circles. It’s only until something else happens to him that he needs to move and do other things. In the original tale, he’s totally comfortable with just getting a bit of food and selling it in the market—he finds it pleasurable to bargain and to talk with the merchants.
Anyways, I like the story of Aladdin because of how it links to desire in the first part of Lázaro at Night and also because it doesn’t give answers. Maybe it’s more calm and easier in a sense, but life is super hard when you don’t have other ambitions. Ambition is a funny word for me. The people in the first part have ambitions, but Aladdin is not ambitious at all. And in my view, I can see ambition as a negative thing, but at the same time, when I look at Aladdin I feel like I could never be that dude. I have more ambitions.
Was there an autobiographical component to Copper (2025) at all? I appreciate that the film reflects what you said earlier. There’s a mundanity to everything in the film even though it’s about how this guy needs an oxygen tank. I appreciate the absurdity that’s present in the film in navigating bureaucratic nightmares as well as interpersonal relationships; it’s low-key but also funny.
When there are autobiographical components, they’re hidden. Like with Lázaro at Night, yeah the issue of desire was there, but it’s not really autobiographical. I was feeling something that then shows up in the characters, and not so much with material things but with how they feel. With Copper, I was somewhere else. I think I’ve managed, with the privileges I’ve had in my life, to be shielded from a lot of the more heavy things of mundane modern life, like these jobs that are extremely soul-crushing. We see that there is this job that Rosa has where she goes to this office. It’s unclear what she does, but we see that what she does is not productive. This isn’t to say that productivity is necessarily a positive thing, but for the fulfillment of the human soul… it’s not great to be doing something that you know is meaningless—all that paperwork, all the bureaucracy of different industries.
Copper is more about observing a world that I find is very unfortunate. The fact that the main character has a sickness, but that the sickness is something everyone doubts… and the audience doubts it too, and even I doubted it when I watched it. You never want to doubt someone’s sickness, but at the same time, the sickness coincides with him seeing a dead person, so perhaps he created it himself. It’s unclear. So how do lies play into that? Maybe he’s just lying to himself that he’s sick. Maybe not. And we hear these conversations about lies in the film that I’m interested in. I’m interested in the ambiguity of lies. When somebody says they’re sick and you don’t believe them, you think, maybe they’re not sick but they believe they are, or they’re making themself sick somehow. The relationship between Lázaro and Rosa is kind of a lie, too. Why does Rosa keep him so close when it feels like she’s uncomfortable at times? But she also gives him rope to continue being enamored with her.
I love what you’re saying because it makes you think about the importance of lies, about whether lies can be a part of actual reality in the way that fiction can.
We convince ourselves, or we try to convince ourselves, that the lives that we have are fulfilling. The moment we stop thinking that, we become depressed. People have different ways and propensities, but for me at least, if I don’t convince myself that the decisions I make and the way I’m leading my life are bringing me joy, I start becoming depressed. In a sense, it’s not so much about the things that I do as it is me telling myself that those things are great (laughter). If I just tell myself that these are good things to do and that things are okay, that’s just me lying to myself, at least to some degree. But I don’t think that’s problematic—I think it’s great. If Lázaro woke up one day and said, “Fuck, what have I done with my face,” well, he doesn’t want to go there. I’m sure he doesn’t. He wants to believe that it was a great decision. It’s difficult to live if you doubt what you do. So that can be a way of lying to yourself, but it’s not harmful; on the contrary, it’s good.
That’s an interesting thing to consider, just the necessity of lying to yourself to feel content with the life you have. Was there anything we didn’t talk about today that you wanted to bring up?
No, not really. It was a conversation that went into different places—it was nice.
There’s a question I end all my interviews with that I wanted to ask you. Do you mind sharing one thing you love about yourself?
The clarity that I have towards what I do. The fact that I’m gonna continue making films gives me a lot of peace, and I like that. There’s a sense that whatever happens, I know I’m just gonna do it and that it brings me joy. And the fact that I have that is somewhat rare. Some other people have it too, but I feel very lucky.
Do you feel like part of this is because you’re lying to yourself?
If you become convinced that you’re lying to yourself, the whole thing falls apart. So, I’d rather not find out (laughter).
Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night (2024) plays tonight for its New York theatrical premiere at Metrograph. His newest feature film, Copper (2025), has its North American premiere on September 12th as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths program.
Thank you for reading the 51st issue of Film Show. Tell a lie until it’s real.
If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Film Show is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Film Show will be able to publish issues more frequently.