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In early 1999, Monika Navarro was halfway through her second year at the Museum School, when she learned that her Uncle Gino had overdosed on heroin in a Tijuana motel room. He'd recently been deported to Mexico from his longtime home in southern California, along with one of his brothers. "There was a shift in my family, a shift in me," Navarro says. Her uncles had been addicts and dealers for years, so her mothertheir sisterhad kept them at a distance. "I became fascinated by these men who loomed large in my past, but I didn't know them," Navarro says.
So she spent the next eight years making a documentary about their lives. Animas Perdidas (Lost Souls) is still in production, but Navarro expects it to play at film festivals next summer and appear on PBS in 2009.
The film centers around Navarro's surviving uncle, Augie, as he tries to exist in a homeland that hadn't been his home for decades. Yet it also tells the story of Navarro's extended Mexican-American family and all its contradictions: a grandfather who brought his children to the United States to give them a better life yet was abusive; a mother who put herself through law school while her brothers succumbed to drugs. Navarro interviewed family members, dug up old photos and letters, and, armed with a digital video camera, traveled to Mexico to visit her uncle. Until his deportation, she had focused her art studies on painting and printmaking. She had never made a film. But with this story, she says, "I didn't feel it was enough to make prints. It felt important for my family to have their own voice."
Navarro raised thousands of dollars to fund Animas Perdidas, but got a break last year when she was selected to participate in the Filmmakers in Residence program at WGBH. That led to a grant from the Independent Television Service, which allowed Navarro to pay herself for the first time since she began the film.
That was back when she was still at the Museum School. Navarro tried, not always successfully, to balance her research for Animas Perdidas with her other work. "I struggled," she says with a rueful laugh. Yet the Museum School had taught her to take herself seriously, she says. "I didn't feel hindered by the fact that I hadn't made a film before. At the Museum School, you learn to use whatever medium helps you tell the story you're trying to tell."
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