Passage of the Spiral (2024) is a film with hazy and indistinct parameters, earning its designation of “pseudo-documentary.” Who is acting, and who is “real”? Which of the many stories being told or represented is true? The film shirks the rigidity of borders—between reality and fiction, between geographies, and between who is permitted to be a storyteller or artist and who is not. Set between the Mixteca region of Mexico and Los Angeles, the film follows the students of Proyecto Yivi, a youth theater workshop held in the quietly atmospheric town of Santo Domingo Yanhuitlán, where a weighty absence hangs in the air. Led by members of the Mexican theater company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (which playfully translates to “lizards lying in the sun”), the town’s youth enact a play that unravels the profound effects of migration to the US on their region, both metaphorically and materially.

Students at CalArts in Los Angeles join as collaborators, and the play (entitled El Camino Donde Nosotros Lloramos, The Road Where We Weep) becomes a borderless site of collective storytelling. As the film’s spiral unfurls, it reveals the characters caught in its concentric shape: the theater makers, the ghosts of Yanhuitlán, and those who left or refuse to leave.

The film was directed by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, a Puerto Rican artist-filmmaker whose theatrical practice grounds her multidisciplinary approach, which spans installation, film, and performance. There’s a sense of intimacy to Natalia’s work, further engendered by the connections she forges between nonactors and amateurs. Passage of the Spiral,which was never meant to be a film, is held together by the same thematic connective tissue that animates her past works: collaboration, fiction, and collective memory.

Natalia and I spoke online from Puerto Rico and Canada, exploring the politics of storytelling through the creation of the film, the melding of her theater and film disciplines, and collaboration across borders. Our conversation was eventually interrupted by Zoom’s time limit, and we had to begin again with another call, which felt appropriate for the cyclical nature of Passage of the Spiral. We later met in person at Images Festival in Toronto, which hosted the film’s Canadian premiere in 2025, where Natalia greeted me with the same warmth she extended throughout the interview.

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Elizabeth Polanco (EP): I’m curious about the spiral in relation to the creation of the film, and its title.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (NLM): I was able to understand my role and the role of this film in a very different way through the idea of a spiral. When I began to edit the film, I was very clear on the fact that I am not Mexican—but I understand migration and this kind of liminal existence through my own experience as a Puerto Rican who lives in the archipelago, has been in the diaspora, and has this conditional citizenship. But still, I am not Mexican. I was in conversation not only with Luisa Pardo and Lázaro Gabino Rodríguez of Lagartijas, who supported me in the process, but also with the Mexican curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar, who was accompanying me and helping me with research as I thought through these questions.

We started talking about spirals, and Daniela wrote a text about her time in the Escuelita Zapatista in Chiapas, in which she outlines what the spiral means for the Zapatistas. That led me to think about what the spiral represents in different Indigenous contexts, as a form that allows everything to happen at the same time, that is concentric, and that is eternally expanding. I really began to think, Okay, maybe I can edit the film in a spiral, and that’s what I tried to do. It became something that was guiding me through my own process—maybe it isn’t visible, maybe only I notice it, but it became a way for me to think about myself as somebody who also got caught in that spiral.

Through this process, I learned that even if you’re not from a specific place, you can collaborate and be an ally and create with people. In film, there’s a taboo that you can’t make work in places that you are not from, because historically, film has been an extractive art form. But I do think that you can create alliances and work with people. As I invested myself in really trying to comprehend the logic of this place, it became clear that because of how I accompanied Lagartijas’s process from the beginning, I was the person that could make this film. And it happened to be that I wasn’t from this particular place.

EP: This specificity of a sense of place leads into my question, because there’s a scene where Luisa is talking about being in Yanhuitlán and she says, “I started to learn many versions of one place.” What was your version of Yanhuitlán?

NLM: I think it has changed over time. This is something that Luisa and I spoke about—I am a foreigner coming into a place, and she also isn’t from Yanhuitlán but has now created her life in this place. She has created a relationship to the people, and then I created a relationship to the people through her. In the beginning, I had a very different understanding than I do now. Yanhuitlán became familiar to me through the process.

There’s something about the way that migration and ideas of progress pushed people out—into Oaxaca City, Veracruz, Mexico City, to eventually migrate to the United States. Yanhuitlán is a town where you can feel the absence of people. You can feel that there are generations of people that have migrated.

That felt extremely different and also extremely familiar, because that’s something I am experiencing in Puerto Rico, where the infrastructure of life has been built for you to leave. You can feel the absence of people. Even though I’m not from Yanhuitlán, I understand the system that defines the logic of it, from my own experience as somebody who grew up in a US colony.

EP: And that both of these migrations are at the behest of the US, or in service of extractive industries that support or benefit the US, essentially.

NLM: There’s this foreign idea of these quaint, magical towns, and I was like, No, this town is actually extremely unruly. It feels like you’re suspended in time, and human beings have time to develop relationships with people without having to run anywhere. Human beings who live in a capitalist system, we’re always in production, we’re always thinking of moving and possessing. Just being in this place that feels suspended in time with these people who are put in a position to leave, I understood that it is a radical act for the people that stay. To invest in that land, and to invest in staying in that place. My relationship has really changed from the moment that I got there, from somebody who was a foreigner to somebody who’s still a foreigner but is also able to feel how the politics in the place operate.

Elizabeth Polanco (EP): Could you tell me about the gestation of the film and the process of connecting Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol and CalArts? How did all of this come to be?

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (NLM): I started collaborating with Lagartijas not knowing that I was going to make a film. A lot of my work has to do with memory and history, but particularly how it pertains to the history of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean; I think a lot about what role fiction plays in the development of history and collective memory.

Through my work with Lagartijas, I’ve also learned about how they think about these similar things, but in the context of Mexico. I started collaborating with them because I was a student at CalArts. I was a student who also studied their work in class, and I met them in a hallway. I was doing my master’s in theater directing, and the same program invited Lazaro and Luisa to do a residency and develop a project with students, which is something that they don’t usually do. They’re an artist collective, and they usually work with people who are members of their collective. I was brought into the project to create the audiovisual components of their theater work.

They were asked to do a work about migration. I heard through conversations with them that as artists who have travel with visas, they move in and out of the US in a way quite different from the way Central American or Mexican migration is portrayed. They had many questions about how to address this from their positionality.

Through their time working in the US, something they ended up discovering was a number of questions around representation, and who has the right to tell a story. Luisa moved to the Mixtec region of Oaxaca around ten years ago, nearby Santo Domingo de Yanhuitlán. Her move, I think, came from a feeling of disillusionment with the art world in Mexico City and wanting to become a farmer. But in the most genuine way, she was trying to figure out other ways to create and other ways to be invested in the land, and she had a desire to create a theater collective within a rural context, where theater wasn’t as present.

Somehow the planets aligned, because Luisa ended up doing a workshop in Nochixtlán, which prompted her to visit Yanhuitlán. … She made an extremely radical move, to leave her life in Mexico City and become fully invested in the daily goings-on and existence and inhabitants of this town. In order to live in this town she proposed to start a theater, painting, and architecture workshop for the youth of Santo Domingo de Yanhuitlán called Proyecto Yivi, which is a big part of the film.

Elizabeth Polanco (EP): There’s also a play represented within the film. Can you describe its trajectory?

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (NLM): They developed a play where in the fictional world, a group of CalArts students travel to Santo Domingo de Yanhuitlán and meet young theater students who have created this theatrical play called Alina, about a grandmother of one of the students, Yayo. The CalArts students fall in love with this play and ask the Yivi students if they can take it abroad, to Los Angeles. They tell them: “We would love to interpret this play for your family, because you can’t just film theater. Theater has to be live, so we will become responsible for your artwork, and we will present it to your families in L.A. on your behalf, because you cannot cross the border.”

The students go back to California and show this theater piece to the families of these young students. Experimental theater programmers in the US find out about this performance, and the CalArts students become famous in the experimental theater world. They begin to show this piece, and they’re interpreting the work of these Indigenous students from the mountains of Mexico, and they start making a little money out of it. At some point in the narrative of the play, Yayo, the oldest Yivi student, asks them, “I want to meet my grandmother. Can you please cross me [across the border]?” At the end of the play, the CalArts cast members dispute about crossing Yayo illegally, especially since they have been profiting in some way or another from the stories of the Yivi students.

It was a very complex and layered theater work, because all of these students—both the CalArts and the Yivi students—are performing fictional versions of themselves.

EP: How did the film take shape from this point?

NLM: I went to Oaxaca and spent time with Luisa and Lazaro and the students of the workshop, and the CalArts students. I was mainly accompanying their process and creating the video work, but through that process, I began to film in the way that I would approach any film project. Throughout the process of rehearsing with the students at CalArts, I became much more invested. The theater play got presented at CalArts and in Mexico City—the theater work that the CalArts students made was shown side by side with Alina, the play that the students in Yanhuitlán made. Then the pandemic happened, and the project paused indefinitely.

I found myself with all of this material that I had shot and accumulated, because I really did approach the filming process as if it was my own work. I was thinking that there could be a film made of this very complex process involving many people, different territories, and the politics of who can tell a story. These people are collaborating across borders, and this work is what’s bringing these people—who live very different existences—together.

EP: How did you even begin?

NLM: I took it on as a beautiful monster that was really difficult to edit. I wanted to interview the children, who are now young adults. I wanted to think about what it means to exist in this liminal place, exist in multiple lands, but also, I needed to find an organizational structure for all of this material that was never meant to be a film. It was meant to be audiovisual accompaniment to a theater piece.

That’s when I began to think of the spiral as this unifying gesture that could help me think through the multitude of voices comprised in the making of this film. Yanhuitlán became a really important character, and that’s how I ended up wrapped around the spiral of making this project. It extended into a multiyear relationship that led me to spend almost four years editing until we finished it, and premiered last year. Before this, Luisa and Lázaro screened the film for the students in Yanhuitlán to get their notes and impressions. We had official screenings in Yanhuitlán, in Oaxaca, and in Mexico City.

Creating with others is one of the things that gives meaning to the horrible and heart-breaking world that we share right now. 

EP: There’s another scene where Yayo asks Luisa, “What are you gaining from the workshop?” She’s explaining her reasoning to him and says, “Compartir no me quita nada.” Sharing doesn’t take anything away from me.

In “Sembrando,” the Belmonte poem that’s recited at both the beginning and the end of the film, there’s a line: “¿Por qué tantos afanes en la jornada sin buscar recompensa?” (Why give so much effort to this journey without seeking any reward?) I’m curious about your perspective on art making and collaboration as a way to share and give one another gifts, without expectation of receiving.

NLM: Collaboration is a complex practice; it is an art form. I can speak to what my perspective is, and this is how I think about my processes. I’ve been feeling really exhausted. I feel really tired. In the last year, I’ve had to realign my intentions—why do I do things? Why do I do the work that I do? What’s the real intention? I don’t need institutional validation. Why am I doing this?

It really comes down to the fact that I want to work with and socialize with what I learn and what I research, and learn from them in the process. It doesn’t make sense for me to do it by myself. It makes sense to do it with others. I am creating films and creating theater as a way to learn and do with others—and I mean that in the most genuine way.

That’s the only thing that’s really keeping me in this wheel, in this spiral creating. I am curious and interested and invested, and creating with others is one of the things that gives meaning to the horrible and heartbreaking world that we share right now. It’s one of the few circumstances that allow us to create networks of solidarity.

A lot of my processes as an artist are guided by building collaborations, intimacy, and developing relationships with people over extended periods of time. We are creating together, but we are also making life together. In creating this film, through my collaboration with Lagartijas and Proyecto Yivi, I learned a lot, and I’m extremely grateful that they were so generous with their space and their time and their intimacy. I was there with a camera documenting their process, as a person who was not from that context, and it was all very unlikely that we were gonna work together—not because the themes that we explore in our works don’t overlap, but because of the physical circumstances that separate us—me living in Puerto Rico, and they’re living and creating in Mexico. But for some divine reason, I ended up being present, and we’ve been able to learn about each other’s contexts and become allies.

The last time I was in Mexico, we did this series of screenings, and there was one conversation held at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo at the UNAM with Luisa, myself, and Yayo. I introduced myself and positioned myself as: This is who I am. This is how I ended up making this film. This is what I do. I spoke about the film formally and conceptually, but I didn’t speak much. At that moment, I realized that the reason I made this film was for these other conversations to take place: for Luisa to share her intention of creating this project to provide children a place where they can escape the crudeness of this world and imagine. To protect them. And for Yayo to talk about his work as an actor and his own concerns about representation, his own perspective on what stories he feels that he should be able to tell. I ended up here so that this film can facilitate these other conversations. If collaboration is truly an art form, it’s also an art form of listening and learning when to talk, when to contribute.

Before my last visit, Luisa communicated that she was going to pause the theater workshop. Yivi would continue offering painting workshops for the community, but the project needed to transform to what it needed to become. The screening that we did in Yanhuitlán was a celebration, but it was also a mourning.

In this bizarre, strange order of events, the film is now a register of this multiyear project. And unknowingly, it has captured and gathered a new meaning for the people who were able to participate in it. And that’s a really beautiful gift.

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EP: You also have a transdisciplinary approach as an artist, and you spoke of drawing from theater. How do you see the film cohering with your body of work?

NLM: I came to this process as a filmmaker, a theater maker with a camera documenting, and eventually making a film about, a theater-making process. I say that I am a theater maker who makes films, mainly because that’s what I’ve been trained as—I was an actor for many years, and then I picked up a camera and started making films. This is one of a series of projects that I am developing now, creating films through a theater-making methodology.

Before 2020, I was making films and directing theater. These practices did not coalesce; they existed as two very different practices. Not because I wanted them to, but because I was moving through different worlds and different scenes. Filmmaking became a way for me to think about certain things that I couldn’t do in the way that I engaged in theater. Passage of the Spiral is one in a series of works that think about theater—as this art form that provides spaces of communion, and spaces for collective thinking and collective learning and unlearning.

EP: I want to end with the Belmonte poem I mentioned earlier. It bookends the movie, at the beginning and end of the spiral. The line repeats, “¡Hay que vivir sembrando! ¡Siempre sembrando!” (We must live sowing, always sowing). What significance does that have for you?

NLM: That poem is recited in the film by Don Julio, a farmer from Yanhuitlán. All of these organic farms, really, to do what he’s doing—he’s ready to survive the apocalypse! [laughs] When I met Don Julio, he gave us a tour of his entire farm, and then I asked him a question about art—how he felt about art. In turn, he took out his phone and showed me this video of him walking though the farm reciting this poem. When it was happening, I was with Karla, Luisa’s goddaughter, who was helping me do sound. We looked at each other and couldn’t believe this was happening. [The poem] was something that I always knew had a lot of emotional significance for me, but also for Julio.

I think about sembrar (to sow) in the context of my relationship to the archipelago of Puerto Rico. But I don’t think it’s unique to my experience, it’s something that expands through a lot of different struggles that are coexisting right now. I think about it when I think about Palestine.

In Puerto Rico, there’s a desire to really go down to the root of who we are, culturally, existentially, philosophically, materially—really understand the root of where we come from, and all of the complexities that entails. The genocide that had to take place for us to be here; how we are descendants of the people who were murdered and raped, but we’re also descendants of the people who did all of that violence, and we’re descendants of the enslaved peoples brought here to work this land.

In Puerto Rico, and beyond Puerto Rico, there are struggles to defend the lands where we live, where we were born. Right now in Puerto Rico there’s a neocolonization process because it’s a tax haven, which causes internal displacement, and then displacement to the US. Continous political, economic, and environmental tragedy also fuels this migration.

We’re not only defending this land to live here. We’re also defending this land so that we can die here. So we can choose where we want to die, and we can become this place eventually. Because that’s what happens, whatever you choose—if you choose to be buried, if you choose to become ashes, you will become the atmosphere of this place. And for me, that makes me think about sembrar. That makes me think about the desire to really deepen the roots in this place, and resist all of the forces that want to push you out.