“It’s not a question of the actor becoming the character, but the character becoming you,” the fictional director in Lázaro at Night says during an audition. The line crystallises a central preoccupation in the prolific Mexican director Nicolás Pereda’s cinema, which repeatedly unsettles conventional divisions between fiction and documentary to forge a singular narrative form. Expanding familiar modes of dramaturgy, Pereda’s films are sly and granular explorations of power, grounded in an acute attention to the body’s most minute gestures and to the tensions that gather beneath dialogue, while revealing how thoroughly everyday reality is itself shaped by the contours of performance.
Often pushing the limits of cinematic realism by incorporating elliptical, nested narratives, whimsical role exchanges, with forms that spiral towards the fantastical and absurd, they combine something of the theatrical playfulness of El Pampero Cine, the ever-slippery literary worlds of Kafka and Mario Levrero, with the somatic sensitivity of Tsai Ming-liang.
Pereda works particularly closely with a recurring repertory of actors – including Teresa Sánchez, Francisco Barreiro, Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez, and Luisa Pardo – whose repeated appearances lend Pereda’s filmography a palimpsestic quality in which previous roles and encounters continue to reconfigure each film. Across these modular forms, Pereda reframes social dramas concerning class divisions, gender relations, and structures of authority as intimate, minimalist interrogations that resist didacticism. Instead, he lingers on the existential weariness of his characters and on the delightful comedy that emerges from our starkly contemporary ennui.
Pereda has become increasingly interested in pushing the limits of fiction, even as his films remain closely attuned to the minute dramas of everyday life. What makes them so thrilling is precisely the friction between that pared-back minimalism and their growing formal instability: genre, the three-act structure, and even the boundaries between performance and reality are continually reconfigured by the deliberate turns towards the oneiric and surreal.
The ICA is delighted to present the first retrospective of Nicolás Pereda's work in the UK and to welcome the filmmaker to the ICA for a conversation following the UK Premiere of his new film Everything Else is Noise on the 27th November.
Tue 10 Nov, 6:30pm
Repeat screening on Sat 28 Nov, 1pm
Gabino and his partner Luisa are unsettled by the intrusion of Paco, Gabino’s cousin, into their cramped Mexico City apartment. Pereda captures the enervating power dynamics that gradually emerge between the trio in his sharp, wry vision of the existential ennui of youth.
Tue 10 Nov, 8:15pm
Repeat screening on Thu 3 Dec, 6:30pm
Working as a mover in Mexico City, Gabino drifts between jobs, family obligations and an elusive search for his missing dog in Nicolás Pereda’s wry, understated portrait of lives caught between movement and stasis.
Sat 14 Nov, 2pm
Repeat screening on Sat 5 Dec, 2pm
When Gabino’s long-absent father unexpectedly returns home, a familiar family drama begins to unravel and repeat itself, as Pereda playfully collapses the boundaries between actors and characters, fiction and lived experience.
Sat 14 Nov, 4pm
Repeat screening on Tue 8 Dec, 8:30pm
Two beguiling works from Nicolás Pereda: a languorous Mexico City interior of artists, books and dreams, paired with a playful school documentary that gradually transforms into the strange tale of a boy whose skin has lost its pigment.
Wed 18 Nov, 6:30pm
Repeat screening on Thu 10 Dec, 8:30pm
Nicolás Pereda’s sly, shape-shifting Fauna sends a family gathering in a remote mining town spiralling into a darkly comic reflection on narcoculture, masculinity and the stories through which violence is imagined.
Sat 21 Nov, 7:30pm
Repeat screening on Tue 15 Dec, 6:30pm
A minimalist comedy of infidelity transforms into a surreal, fantastical inquiry into ambition, art-making, and the instability of friendship, as a trio of artist friends navigate a love triangle further strained by their competition for the same role in a low-budget film.
Wed 25 Nov, 6:30pm
Repeat screening on Thu 17 Dec, 6:30pm
In Pereda’s Kafkaesque thriller of bureaucracy, a mine-worker Lázaro becomes increasingly mired by respiratory issues after he finds a corpse on the side of the road. Rather than build a central narrative around the murder mystery, however, Pereda moves off-centre to explore how systemic violence seeps into the inner lives of those on the periphery.
Fri 27 Nov, 6:30pm
More screenings from 28 Nov
UK PREMIERE
Everything Else is Noise + Q&A
An absurdist chamber comedy, Nicolás Pereda’s latest feature centres on the behind-the-scenes staging of an interview with a middle-aged female noise musician, which unfurls into a wider exploration of gender, performance and the costs of artistic independence.
