Jimena Muhlia

I started as a dancer and actress in 1998 in an independent theater company in Mexico City. I was part of some plays during the period of 1998-2004, with these works we did several tours in Mexico, in the circuit of renowned theaters, and in 2001 and 2003 the tours were expanded by Colombia and Ecuador within local theater festivals. During the same period I studied Architecture at UNAM;but my interest in cinema was latent all that time though ; so in 2012 I applied to Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica to formalize that desire, where they accepted me in 2013. I have been making films since then, doing various jobs during school that are the antecedent of my first short film: “Evaporado” (2017), where I worked with 17-year-old non-actors with who I looked for the scenes through improvisation exercises and rehearsals in front the camera to avoid seeing it during filming. In the field of improvisation and experimentation, I made “La Caja China” and a documentary adaptation of “West Side Story” with young acting students, the objective of these pieces was a cinematographic research with already existing theatrical elements. In 2017 I moved to Los Angeles, from there I wrote, produced and directed Lily <3 (World Premiere at FICM 2020). This project featured a girl 5-year-old, whom I have known since she was born, and where her real space, her house, her friends, were part of the project. We approached with documentary techniques to try to capture the freshness of her behavior in her family environment. I am currently writing my first fictional feature film about a widow in her 60s who tries to rebuild her life, but it is through her fantasies that she becomes a rumba dancer, where her true longings for life. My cinematographic search is configuring the encounter between real scenes mixed with the fiction of stories that I like to tell, those wishes that are kept secret and roam in the thinking of the characters.