Maria Novaro

The danzón is danced to sentimental ballads in the salones de baile (dance halls) of Mexico, where a largely working-class clientele gathers to display dance steps that have remained unchanged for generations, amid shimmering light and flashy decor that evoke the era of the 1940s and 1950s.

In Danzón she portrays the traditional Mexican dancehall culture, which has strict gender codes and procedures and contrasts it to the port-town of Veracruz.

The film follows Julia Solorzono (María Rojo), a single mother whose only escape is in the popular dance halls of Mexico City.

When her usual partner Carmelo (Daniel Regis) does not show up for their dance meetings she decides to leave her kids behind and go look for him in Veracruz where he is from.

It is a journey of self-discovery for Julia as she abandons the search for Carmelo and enjoys the Veracruz life before going back to life in Mexico City.

Danzón was the film that established her career and gained her international attention.

Novaro decided to play with the traditional melodrama genre, which is very popular amongst Mexican women, by adding humor to the movie.

She also treats the subjects of women and homosexuality, but with something that is beyond the ken of the Spaniard Almodóvar: psychological penetration and genuine feeling.

Danzón, as you can guess from its title, is a dance film.

María Novaro (born María Luisa Novaro Peñaloza; September 11, 1951, in Mexico City) is a Mexican film director.

She was among the first generation of female filmmakers to graduate from a film school in Mexico.

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.

María 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 Cinematográficos based in UNAM.

Leaving aside such musicals as Grease (1978) and Hair (1979), together with such ballet films as The Turning Point (1977) and Blood Wedding (1981), there have been two types of dance movies over the fifteen years or so preceding the making of Danzón : the fast dance film, which emphasizes the liberating spontaneity and physicality, if not sexuality, of the dance floor (e.g., Saturday Night Fever [1977], Flashdance [1983], and Dirty Dancing [1987]), and its opposite number, the ballroom dance picture, which highlights the restraint, elegance, and stylization— the structure — to be found in ballroom dancing, a tradition untarnished by displays of cheap emotion and obvious sensuality.

The one dance relieves the protagonist of his inhibitions and thus frees him from the numbing routine of daily (working) life, the other restores those inhibitions at the same time that it replaces the routine of everyday life with another, far more pleasurable, even less deviating one.

In 1981, while at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos, she made her first short films Lavaderos, sobre las olas and De encaje y azúcar all on a super 8 camera.

Later became a member of the Cine Mujer collective, which was a women's film collective interested in women's stories and creating opportunities for women in the Mexican film industry, and who joins her countryman and fellow director Jaime Humberto Hermosillo in her desire to make films that contemplate the macho-dominated culture of Mexico— she from the feminine perspective (not feminist, she insists), he from the homosexual one.

It is this collective in which Novaro directed Es la Primera 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 decided 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 of something or someone is established in this short film and is carried out throughout her films.

Her next short Azul Celeste (1987) told the story of a pregnant woman looking for her baby's father in Mexico City.

This story carried over into her first feature film Lola (1989).

Novaro co-wrote Lola with her sister Beatriz.

Lola, named after the protagonist, tells the story of a woman that has been abandoned by her daughter's father.

She is confronted with isolation and hopelessness in vast Mexico City as she tries to relocate her daughter's father.

Many feminist criticizes the passive Lola character and the way in which she cannot overcome her abandonment.

However, Novaro has said that she refuses to be limited by taking a political stance and does not consider her work to be feminist.

In an interview with Isabel Arredondo, Novaro has said that with Lola, she was not only interested in the story of Lola and her child but the film was a way to “reflect profoundly on women, motherhood and Mexico City”.

Therefore, Lola being controlled by her emotions makes her an accurate depiction of a woman going through abandonment.

As she was finishing the editing of Lola she decided to write a much lighter story and in collaboration with her sister wrote Danzón (1991) which was the second feature to be directed by María Novaro.

The danzón of Novaro's title, loosely translated as “refined ballroom dance,” is simple in nature: Each partner concentrates on completing a perfect square of steps, making eye contact only fleetingly in what amounts to a pantomime of courtship, of male pursuit and female coquetry.

Her next two features, El jardín del Edén (1994) and Sin Dejar Huella (2000) focus on the idea of Borderlands while still sticking to her theme of females on a journey through Mexico.

It is through her narrative that she explores new ways of seeing Mexico that depart from stereotypical representations of the borderlands and its inhabitants.

The Garden of Eden (1994) was filmed in Tijuana and its surroundings on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States.