“We Were Re-Traumatized by Working with the State.”: Jasmín Mara López on Her Hot Docs-debuting Silent Beauty

Jasmín Mara López is a journalist, audio producer, and nonfiction filmmaker whose 2015 audio doc Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border received the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award. But the Los Angeles and New Orleans-based director-producer, an immigrant rights advocate with family ties to Mexico, is also a victim of trauma herself. And even more tragically, not at the hands of any faceless government bureaucracy but by those who purport to love her the most. It’s a harrowing tale, one López heroically, and with brutal honesty, dives headfirst into in her Hot Docs world-premiering Silent Beauty. The courageously intimate film explores the sexual abuse, both perpetrated and experienced by generations of her own family, and the culture of silence she’s now intent on taking a sledgehammer to. Starting, remarkably, with herself. Determined to name and shame her Baptist minister grandfather, López embarks on a surprising spiritual and physical journey, connecting and reconnecting with far too many female relatives with accounts painfully similar to her own. Filmmaker caught up with the first-time filmmaker to find out why she decided to combine frank conversations with a trove of family movies (from the archive of her abuser no less) – exposing herself so vulnerably in the process. But also how she managed to sift through the fragments of her shattered childhood, and reshape those pieces into one joyful feature-length mosaic. Silent Beauty screens Hot Docs theatrically May 3 and May 7, and virtually May 4-8 (geo-blocked to Canada).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.