Maria Novaro

Novaro co-wrote Lola with her sister Beatriz.[12] 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.[13] However, Novaro has said that she refuses to be limited by taking a political stance and does not consider her work to be feminist.[14] 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”.[15] 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)[16] 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. 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.[17] 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.[18] Danzón was the film that established her career and gained her international attention.[19]
Novaro decided to play with the traditional melodrama genre, which is very popular amongst Mexican women, by adding humor to the movie.[20] 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. 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.
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.[21]

The Garden of Eden (1994) was filmed in Tijuana and its surroundings on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States. It was a co-production with France and Canada. Premiered at the Venice Festival of 1994, it had a wide European distribution. It received a Coral Prize in Havana, the Glauber Rocha Award from the Latin American specialized critics, and the best actor award at the Festival de Cartagena (to Bruno Bichir). This film was not shown on Mexican screens as a result of the recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in which cinema was not protected as a cultural exception.[22]

Without Leaving a Trace (2000) is a road movie that was filmed in a long journey from Ciudad Juárez to the Mexican Caribbean coast in Quintana Roo. Starring Tiaré Scanda and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, it was a co-production with Spain and had its world premiere in San Sebastián. Awarded as the best Latin American film at the 2001 Sundance Festival, she also won the Audience Award at the Los Angeles Latino Festival, the Audience Award at the Guadalajara Festival and the Critics' Award. He won two Ariel awards: for best photography and best special effects.[23]

The Good Herbs (2010), starring Úrsula Pruneda, Ofelia Medina, and Ana Ofelia Murguía, premiered at the Rome Festival, where she won the Best Female Performance Award (shared with her three protagonists). On this occasion, she e fully explored the world of mother-daughter relationships, Alzheimer's and ethnobotany.[24]
Winning eight Maguey awards at the Guadalajara Festival, including the audience award for the best film, best screenplay, best female performance (Ursula Pruneda) and best photography, among others. She received two awards at the Amazonas Film Festival (best screenplay and best female performance) and also received two Ariel awards, one for better female co-act (Ofelia Medina) and another for visual effects (Alejandro Valle). In the Festival of Sto. Domingo received the best music award (La Lengua) and won the Grand Coral Third Prize at the Havana Film Festival that same year. Distributed mainly in Asian countries, it was commercialized for more than a year in several cities in Japan.[25]

Tesoros was directed, written, produced and edited by Maria Novaro, released in 2017 marks a departure for the much Mexican film. Its story has Dylan who already plays a pirates video game on his iPad, dreaming of Francis Drake appearing to him on a dark and stormy night and telling him he's saved up a treasure for the young boy. Dylan and his new primary school friends embark on a leisurely hunt to find the treasure trove, which takes them to limestone islands just off the coast. The film starts off with a view of the subtropical forest and a deep marine blue tropical sky, captured from a van, painted light blue, taking six-year-old Dylan and his family to live in Barra del Potosi, a stunningly quaint beachside chalet community behind a sandbar on Mexico's Pacific Coast.[26]
Tesoros is thoroughly lit by bright warm colors and an eye for a palette of blues and yellows and standout reds that transfer the soft tones of the seascapes to open door houses, even a school, whose walls and shelves are spangled with lively toys and students’ paintings. When Novaro was questioned about her unusual choice of style for her new film she answered, “I was interested in making something different from what we normally get with children’s films. I wanted to make it very real. Although there is the fantasy in the children’s lives, I wanted to find a way for that fantasy to be completely linked to the real world, a world as experienced by children in my country. So I wrote the story to happen in this place, a paradise, though part of one of the most violent states in all Mexico, the state of Guerrero.”[27]

One of Novaro's first short films (a school work: An Island Surrounded by Water, 1984) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for its permanent film collection and was distributed in the United States by Women Make Movies. The film obtained a special mention from the jury at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, and the Ariel for Best Fiction Short Film.

Azul Celeste (1987) is a 40-minute short that was originally part of the movie “Historias de Ciudad” (produced by the Department of Cinematographic Activities of the UNAM). Already as an independent film, it won the Golden Dancer Award for Best Film at the Huesca Film Festival, and also the Fifth Centennial Prize, in addition to being nominated for an Ariel.

Other short films featured in Novaro's filmography are: Sin Miedo (2010), La Morena (2004, also Best Film in Huesca), and Otoñal (1995) premiered at the Venice Festival in the Finestre Sulle Imagini section.[28]