Ángeles Cruz

Ángeles Cruz (born 1969) is a Mexican actress, film director, and screenwriter.

As a filmmaker, she has focused on themes of ostracization, female sexuality, and gender violence.

As she explained in a 2022 interview, "I have three imbalances: I come from an indigenous community, I am a woman, and I am a lesbian – things that have been stereotyped and placed in an emerging situation of survival."

Her work has been recognized with three Ariel Awards.

Ángeles Cruz is originally from Villa Guadalupe Victoria in San Miguel el Grande, Oaxaca, a mostly indigenous community high in the mountains of Oaxaca.

She grew up primarily speaking Spanish, but learned some Mixtec from her father.

In her community there was no electricity, no water, and no cinema.

She saw only one film in her first sixteen years, El joven Juárez, which her father had in 16 mm.

"When I saw the film for the first time in a cinema, it changed me, transformed me; it totally pulled out the rug," she recalled.

She wanted to be an agronomist and dedicate herself to farming, but her family had to relocate, first to Tlaxiaco, and later to Oaxaca.

There, she switched to studying theater, a decision she credits to her high school teacher Sergio Santamaría.

Cruz studied at the Miguel Cabrera Center of Artistic Education in Oaxaca, and later completed a licentiate in acting at the INBA Theater Art School in Mexico City.

In 1994, she began getting roles in cinema.

Her first film as an actress was the Swedish-Danish drama La hija del puma about massacres that occurred in Guatemala against the indigenous people.

Her performance was nominated for the Guldbagge Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role.

In 2011, Cruz started writing her own stories, and directed a short film made from one such script, La tiricia o cómo curar la tristeza.

It was produced by the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, and won the Ariel Award for Best Short Film in 2013.

She continued with the shorts La carta and Arcángel, followed by her first feature, Nudo Mixteco, starring Sonia Couoh and Noé Hernández, which tells three stories of women living in indigenous communities in Oaxaca.

Regarding the film's explicit love scenes between women, Cruz said,

"Homosexuality has been crossed out in the world due to ignorance and due to this impasse that exists. For me it was important to name it and show it forcefully, not leave it to the imagination, not self-censor and let it remain in the line of imagination for the viewer to complete. I feel that it is a beautiful manifestation of love, and I feel that lesbian women in the communities have also remained in the dark, marginalized. Male homosexuality is named, everything from the male gaze. It seemed important to me to name it."