Maria Novaro

Maria Novaro (born Maria Luisa Novaro Peñloza, September 11, 1951 in Mexico City) is a Mexican film director. She was amongst the first generation of female filmmakers to graduate from a Mexican film school. She has made five feature films and fourteen short films. Within the Mexican film industry, she has been a cinematographer, sound mixer, director, screenwriter and editor. Today, Novaro is one of the best known Mexican filmmakers to come out of the New Mexican Cinema and her films express Millian’s idea of cinema in feminine.

Maria Novaro studied sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, UNAM. After gaining some interest in filmmaking she decided to study film at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cenmatograficos based in UNAM. In 1981, while at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cenmatograficos, she made her first short films Lavaderos, Sobre las Olas and De Encaje y Azúcar all on a super 8 camera. Later that year she joined Colectivo Cine-Mujer which was a women’s film collective interested in women’s stories and creating opportunities for women in the Mexican film industry. It is in the collective that Novaro directed Es la Premira Vez in 1981.

Maria Novaro started her career in the Mexican film industry as a cinematographer and sound mixer. It was only after she worked as an assistant director for the Alberto Cortés film Amor a la Vuelta de la Esquina (1985) that she decide to make her short film Una Isla Rodeada de Agua (1985). This short was a feminist adaptation of the famous Mexican novel Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo. In this short film a young girl goes on a journey to the Guerrero coast in search for a mother that abandoned her. The theme of a female protagonist on a journey through contemporary Mexico in search for something or someone is established in this short film and is carried out throughout her films.

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