Oaxaca on Tape: A Profile of Filmmaker Rafael Ballesteros

April 17, 2014

When you walk down the streets of Oaxaca with Rafael Ballesteros, there’s a story waiting around every corner. It might be about the secret underground tunnels running between the convent and the cathedral, or about Benito Juárez’s troops using the façade of the cathedral for target practice; then again, it could be about the cable car built by President Porfirio Díaz that went from his house to that of his mistress, or the one about the wealthy Oaxacan family that had the street from their house to the church paved with silver for their son’s baptism. This is Ballesteros’ Oaxaca, the one he grew up in, and the one that continues to inspire his work.

The son of an architect who’d dabbled in film as a kid with a Super 8 Camera, Ballesteros grew up going to the movies, and knew early on that this was the world he was meant to be a part of. “I wanted to be an actor because I wanted do so many things and I realized that the only way to be a soldier, a bank robber and a doctor was through film,” he says.

He would study first at Colorado College and later at the New York Film Academy, where he found himself more suited for work behind the camera than in front of it, and shifted towards directing.

Returning to Mexico after three years in New York, Ballesteros started making small documentary films exploring Oaxacan themes. An early project, called Los Héroes de Alcalá, takes music as its subject and features everyone from Oaxacan street musicians to the people of the Sierra Mixe, who learn to read and write music before any verbal language. Another film featured the Japanese master printmaker Shinzaburo Takeda, who’s lived in Oaxaca for decades. To finance his personal projects, Ballesteros took on an array of commercial gigs, some of which brought him to places like Germany, Austria and Morocco.

One particularly memorable opportunity came when Ballesteros was one of the filmmakers invited to Cook’s Branch, a nature reserve in Montgomery, Texas, to document the meeting of a dozen of the world’s most brilliant theoretical physicists, including Stephen Hawking himself. When they arrived, the filmmakers were told that they weren’t to interrupt the physicists, who would decide whether or not they wanted to speak to the cameras. Disappointed by their lack of access, most of the filmmakers left early; Ballesteros stayed, and ended up spending ten days alongside the physicists, taking hours and hours of film. He says he was amazed at how appreciative these brilliant men were of everyday life—Hawking, who has ALS, in particular. “This guy, who is like the most intelligent person alive now, can’t move a single muscle and he is still happy,” Ballesteros says. At one point, Hawking decided that he wanted to ride a horse. Since his illness made actually riding one impossible, the team rigged up a horse-drawn wagon that he could sit in, and Ballesteros captured it all on tape.

A big turning point came in 2007. The Center for Global Philanthropy, which introduces philanthropists to worthy international causes, was doing a workshop in Vietnam and hired Ballesteros as a photographer. He was on hand as the philanthropists learned about different projects for sustainable development, and soon started thinking about a project of his own. While Oaxaca had grown in population, its industries hadn’t, which left a large population of jobless youth. With its wealth of history and culture, the state had always been a destination for foreign film crews, and Ballesteros wondered why Oaxacans themselves couldn’t be the ones to document their home on tape. “To me it’s crazy that people from England are coming here to make a film about mezcal,” he says. “We should be the ones who make a film about mezcal!”

And so, in 2010, he founded Ballesteros Films, a non-profit that offers film production classes for Oaxacan youth, with the intention of creating a whole new industry. Last year he had fifteen students; now two of them work alongside him making documentaries. It is not easy to start a non-profit in one of the poorest states in Mexico, but Ballesteros has high hopes: “I feel like there are so many things that can be done here,” he says.

Though he plans to continue traveling, there’s no doubt that Ballesteros’ heart will always be in Oaxaca, where he eventually plans to have a little bar on the beach. But before then, there’s a lot of work to do, and many lives to live.

To find out more about Ballesteros Films, visit www.ballesterosfilms.org

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