L.A.'S BIGGEST MUSIC PUBLICATION SINCE 2005
VIDEO PREMIERE: GEMMA CASTRO “MÍRAME”
Gemma Castro—who has worked with L.A. RECORD alums like Rudy De Anda and Low Leaf—put out a lovely self-titled EP in 2016, and then spent month after painstaking month making this dreamy Super-8 video with co-director Oscar Flores. “Mírame” is an understated song that’s lo-fi in a way that actually makes sense, like a TV broadcast coming in from thousands of miles away with a rigidly retro video aesthetic as a lens to closely examine a story about love and alienation. Castro’s EP is available here and she performs on Sat., Apr. 21—Record Store Day!—at High Fidelity Records in L.A. Castro explains the story behind the video:
“In making this film, I was very inspired by surrealism and psychedelia, and the seemingly surreal and imaginative perspectives we have about the love we experience—and how social structures, fear, and the past affects the way we perceive what happens to us and ourselves. In terms of filmmaking, I was very inspired by Japanese film maker Nobuhiko Obayashi and by old Vicente Fernandez music videos. I have always been very impacted by the way Vicente Fernandez music videos romanticize this macho character—Vicente—even though in his videos he is always sad/violent about something; clearly unhappy, not able to confront his sensitivity, and instead drinks away all his pain and cries and sings.
In most cultures, and especially within the traditional Latin culture. I feel that men are often raised and taught to need to have ownership in relationships and women are also taught to desire to be owned. Even when it is harmful to us, we continue these habits of ownership, we continue to romanticize the people who hurt us and we blame ourselves when we are not what others want us to be.
When things don’t work out, it hurts you so much because it makes you question what is your identity to you, when you don’t have someone else confirming it for you.
We see it so much in our culture through our telenovelas. We see women on screen all the time literally losing their minds over men. In the song, I sample a scene from the Spanish telenovela ‘María la del Barrio’ of character Soraya Montenegro’s voice crying expressing her desperate need of ownership of the man she is infatuated with.
I approached Oscar Flores who had a super 8 camera initially in 2016, with my idea and treatment for this music video and after many months of thrifting clothes, scouting spots, shooting and editing, we made it happen”