Carmen Barajas Sandoval - Cinema Career

Cinema Career

Carmen first contact with the cinema industry was in 1940. She was then 15 years old and a friend of her family who worked in the business offered her a summer job as a script girl. From the very first moment, she fell in love with the making of films and returned every time she had vacations from school. She was eager to learn everything she could and was soon known for being the first one to arrive into the set and the last one to leave at night. Her desire to be in that world led her to ask her friend and neighbor Jorge Negrete, for a job. He gladly took her under his wing and he hired her as his assistant. Carmen was determined to learn as much as she could from every aspect of a production. She was known for going around the set asking questions to everyone she ran into. After 5 years of working with him, Negrete help her by including her as production assistant in his friends' movies.

Carmen's imposing and flamboyant personality soon became famous among the show business personalities of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, her hard work got noticed quite soon and in 1951, at the age of 26, producer Antonio Matouk included her in his executive production team for a Buñuel movie called Los olvidados. Both Buñuel and Matouk were so impressed by young Carmen's hard and efficient work that she became the most important person in Matouk's team who immediately signed her as her principal executive producer.

Her cinema career spanned for 36 years. During this time she was related to 84 productions, mostly as executive producer but also in the overall production and distribution of the films as well. "Movies are magical, they can make you dream, they can make you laugh or cry or even take you into the future or the past, the movie industry is undoubtedly the ultimate dream factory"

Along her career Carmen worked with some of the most important stars, directors and producers of her time such as: Luis Buñuel, Jean Renoir, Emilio Fernández, Ismael Rodríguez and particularly with Luis Alcoriza with whom she shared a long life friendship and with whom she made the vast majority of her films.

Among the movies she made, some were later included into the 100 best in Mexican history ever list, mostly the ones she made with Alcoriza and Buñuel, such as Los Olvidados, Él, La Cucaracha, El Ángel Exterminador, Tlayucan, La Ilusión viaja en Tranvía, Dos tipos de Cuidado, El Esqueleto de la Señora Morales, Tiburoneros & Doña Perfecta.

In the early 1970s, she partially retired from the industry, mostly because she thought that the movies that were made around that time had no quality whatsoever. "It is very sad to see the decline of the cinema that was once considered as the most important one in the Spanish speaking world. I my time, we cared about art, about making intelligent and inspiring movies with great productions and great stars, in the '70s, producers and directors only cared about how much money they could make, and, since sex it's a proven formula to sell anything, they focused on making cheap movies that only depicted prostitutes that were having soft core porn with third class comics and actors. This movies were indeed an economic success, but were the kind of movies that never stood the test of time, since people forgot them as soon as they left the movie theatre. No great stars ever participated in such movies nor any great star came from one of them. What this movies really were is poison to the once great Mexican movie industry."

In 1974, director Miguel Delgado offered her a large sum of money in order to work with him in a movie called Las Ficheras, but she refused, stating that she rather stay home than work in a piece of trash. "I don't need the money- said Carmen- I work for art. It will be an insult to all the great producers, directors and stars with whom I had the privilege to work with if I now decide to participate in such a disgrace." Carmen, however, did returned sometimes to make movies in the 1970s, all of them with friend Luis Alcoriza, because she thought that even if this movies had a sexual content, the stories did not focused on sex. Finally, in 1982, she made her last movie called Tac, Tac, han violado a una mujer, in Spain, again with Alcoriza. This movie had a strong feminist theme and won the "Critics Award" at Cannes Film Festival, and Carmen decided that this movie would be the perfect ending of her long career. Today Carmen says that Mexican cinema is slowly recovering from those "Annus Horribilis" although she still believes there's a long way to run. "There are some good stories out there, and good actors too, in recent years I've seen some great movies such as El Callejón de los Milagros, Conejo en la Luna, El Crimen del Padre Amaro or Arrancame la Vida I really do believe that if they continue to make this high quality films we will one day regain our prestige.... I hope to still be around to see it."