Amber Bemak is the director of 100 Ways to Cross the Border.
Who is Guillermo Gómez-Peña for you?
He is an incredible artist, writer, and philosopher whose work I admire.
You question the power structure that exists in the relationship between you, as the filmmaker, and Guillermo, as the subject of your film. How was this important to you?
This has been an important aspect of all of my work, since I started making films at 20 years old. In a way, this question was the compass and the starting point of my interest and practice in documentary film. I believe that given the history and continued violence of representational media, it is important to include this question about power and film in any work that I engage with. This film was no exception, and luckily because Guillermo as a protagonist also creatively works with this question, we could play with it together in the work.
The concept of border has been present in many of your works. Which meanings do you attach to it?
I have found myself making work around borders possibly due to living for long periods of time in countries where I was not born, therefore interacting with many borders of country, language, etc. My most dramatic work on a physical border was filming for and collaborating on Tejal Shah’s epic project Between the Waves on the India/Pakistan border- the Great Rann of Kutch. I was filming a scene where two queer people were having sex in an extremely unconventional way when we were caught by the border police- the protagonists naked, and myself and other crew with a number of cameras, which were prohibited in the border area. I’ll let that story hang in suspense right there as to what happened after we were caught because it’s too long to tell.
