Nicolás Pereda

Directing

Nicolás Pereda

Born 1982-01-01 · Mexico City, Mexico

Nicolás Pereda was born in Mexico City and holds an MFA in film from York University in Toronto. His films include the features Perpetuum Mobile (2009), Summer of Goliath (2010), Greatest Hits (2012), Killing Strangers (2013), The Absent (2014), Minotaur (2015), and My Skin, Luminous (2019) and Fauna (2020) is his latest film. His work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Killing Strangers poster
5.2

A series of auditions is taking place in a museum-like living room. Various men improvise or deliver prepared lines, rehearse gestures and slogans, aim guns, and collapse as if mortally wounded. The theme of revolution is repeatedly invoked. In between, there are scenes of a desert landscape. Three men seeking to join the Mexican Revolution at the beginning of the last century have lost their way. Conflicts smolder among them, water is running low, and mutual mistrust is beginning to take hold. Placing the reenactment of a possible historical event alongside the preparations for it serves to underline the theatricality of every cinematic account of history. Moreover, on a kind of playful meta-meta-level, the scenes in which the actors feel their way through set pieces from a Beatles song or standard battle slogans allow the viewer to witness the simultaneous construction and deconstruction of a collective myth of revolution.

Killing Strangers

2013

Venice 70: Future Reloaded poster
5.0

Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.

Venice 70: Future Reloaded

2013

Everything Else Is Noise poster
NR

Rosa, a contemporary music composer, agrees to give her first television interview at her colleague Tere’s apartment to keep it secret from her husband. What begins as a simple professional conversation turns into an absurd and comic portrait of rivalries and affections among three women—Rosa, Tere, and Tere’s daughter Luisa—interrupted by power outages, a constantly barking dog, and the visit of a famous composer. As the interview unravels, family and artistic tensions surface, revealing, with humor, both the fragility of prestige and the strength of complicity.

Everything Else Is Noise

2026

Everything Else Is Noise poster
NR

Rosa, a contemporary music composer, agrees to give her first television interview at her colleague Tere’s apartment to keep it secret from her husband. What begins as a simple professional conversation turns into an absurd and comic portrait of rivalries and affections among three women—Rosa, Tere, and Tere’s daughter Luisa—interrupted by power outages, a constantly barking dog, and the visit of a famous composer. As the interview unravels, family and artistic tensions surface, revealing, with humor, both the fragility of prestige and the strength of complicity.

Everything Else Is Noise

2026

The Absent poster
4.4

An old man lives alone in a shabby cabin in a remote mountainous area of Mexico. His house is set to be demolished in order to facilitate the redevelopment of the area. He doesn't know how to protect his house. Time goes by and one day a young man shows up on his doorstep. Looking exhausted, he starts his new routine here, cooking and doing laundry just like the old man.

The Absent

2014

Fausto poster
5.3

On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply.

Fausto

2019

Dear Chantal poster
7.3

Pereda returns with a small, mysterious and moving tribute to Chantal Akerman, conceived as a series of joyful impossible letters addressed to the great disappeared from the cinema, to answer her fictional question about renting her bright apartment in Coyoacán.

Dear Chantal

2021

Dear Chantal poster
7.3

Pereda returns with a small, mysterious and moving tribute to Chantal Akerman, conceived as a series of joyful impossible letters addressed to the great disappeared from the cinema, to answer her fictional question about renting her bright apartment in Coyoacán.

Dear Chantal

2021

Dear Chantal poster
7.3

Pereda returns with a small, mysterious and moving tribute to Chantal Akerman, conceived as a series of joyful impossible letters addressed to the great disappeared from the cinema, to answer her fictional question about renting her bright apartment in Coyoacán.

Dear Chantal

2021

Interview with the Earth poster
6.0

Through a series of interviews and enactments we learn the story of Nico and Amalio, two children who lost a friend while climbing a mountain. Documentary and fiction seamlessly merge creating a hybrid, poetic film.

Interview with the Earth

2008

The Palace poster
5.3

The Palace is a documentary that follows the everyday life of seventeen women who live together, sharing a large house for emotional and financial reasons. They help each other to train for various jobs. Most become nannies, domestic workers and private nurses for elderly patients.

The Palace

2013

The Palace poster
5.3

The Palace is a documentary that follows the everyday life of seventeen women who live together, sharing a large house for emotional and financial reasons. They help each other to train for various jobs. Most become nannies, domestic workers and private nurses for elderly patients.

The Palace

2013

All Things Were Now Overtaken By Silence poster
4.8

Carefully shot in black and white, All Things Were Now Overtaken by Silence is a meditation on the filming of a strange play: a fascinating monologue by actress, director, performance artist and political activist Jesusa Rodriguez of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s poem First I Dream.

All Things Were Now Overtaken By Silence

2010

Lázaro at Night poster
5.2

Three friends – a trio in love – get together after an audition. Their prosaic exchanges take a different turn when they remember how they met.

Lázaro at Night

2024

Lázaro at Night poster
5.2

Three friends – a trio in love – get together after an audition. Their prosaic exchanges take a different turn when they remember how they met.

Lázaro at Night

2024

Fauna poster
5.5

Luisa and Gabino visit their parents in a mining town in the north of Mexico. Their father’s only interest in them is sparked by Luisa’s actor boyfriend when he acts out the role of a narco kingpin. To cope with family tensions, Gabino imagines a parallel reality of detectives and organized crime.

Fauna

2021

Fauna poster
5.5

Luisa and Gabino visit their parents in a mining town in the north of Mexico. Their father’s only interest in them is sparked by Luisa’s actor boyfriend when he acts out the role of a narco kingpin. To cope with family tensions, Gabino imagines a parallel reality of detectives and organized crime.

Fauna

2021

Fauna poster
5.5

Luisa and Gabino visit their parents in a mining town in the north of Mexico. Their father’s only interest in them is sparked by Luisa’s actor boyfriend when he acts out the role of a narco kingpin. To cope with family tensions, Gabino imagines a parallel reality of detectives and organized crime.

Fauna

2021

Copper poster
NR

On the outskirts of an isolated mining town, Lázaro discovers a dead body. He thinks he has a respiratory illness and doesn’t want to go back to the mine. Rumours, suspicion and desire surround him.

Copper

2025

Copper poster
NR

On the outskirts of an isolated mining town, Lázaro discovers a dead body. He thinks he has a respiratory illness and doesn’t want to go back to the mine. Rumours, suspicion and desire surround him.

Copper

2025

The Empty Classroom poster
NR

Eleven award winning directors explore why nearly one out of every two students in Latin America never graduates high school.

The Empty Classroom

2015

No artwork available
NR

Acclaimed Mexican Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda presents a film/performance/lecture on the life and work of “C.B.,” an artist, political activist, amateur archeologist, and anarchist.

The Private Property Trilogy: A Survey of the Life and Films of C.B.

2018

No artwork available
NR

Acclaimed Mexican Canadian filmmaker Nicolás Pereda presents a film/performance/lecture on the life and work of “C.B.,” an artist, political activist, amateur archeologist, and anarchist.

The Private Property Trilogy: A Survey of the Life and Films of C.B.

2018

My Skin, Luminous poster
4.6

Enigmatic and deceptively playful in tone, this film from Gabino Rodríguez, in collaboration with Nicolás Pereda, boldly transforms mundane, realist observations at a rural Mexican schoolhouse into fantasy and a sly comment on childhood, rituals, and race.

My Skin, Luminous

2019