Saray Rebolledo as La Flaca in Rains Over Babel
After its premiere at Sundance Film Festival, I haven’t stopped thinking about Rains Over Babel. It’s a film that’s as unabashedly queer as it is religious as it is magical as it is ambitious, diving into the stories of those who frequent a purgatory-like bar named Babel. Everything about Babel and the world around it, which takes place in the city of Cali in Colombia, is like a gorgeous fever dream, with parallel storylines about what it means to challenge death or truly live unfolding at every turn. It’s a piece of magical realism that pulls from a rich history of mythical and religious storytelling and that actually feels magical, a rarity in a cinematic landscape that so often leans into dull realism instead.
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It’s impossible to get into every one of its characters, but just to dive into a few: there’s La Flaca, the city’s own version of Death; Dante, her servant who escorts others to their death; El Boticario, our Virgil directly addressing the audience while diving into this purgatorio; Jacob, a son of a preacher who longs to be a drag queen and experiences Christlike stigmata; and Uma, a woman with a talking salamander sidekick who is desperate enough bet years of her own life in order to get back her daughter. All of these lives and more are somehow contained within just under two hours of cinema, reminiscent of something like The Wachowskis & Tom Tykwer’s Cloud Atlas, and it’s a wonder that they all manage to cohere and deliver on a fulfilling narrative and emotional level.
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Between screenings in South Florida at Miami Film Festival and OUTshine Film Festival, I pleasantly conversed with Gala del Sol for about an hour, bouncing between our native languages and diving into how the film was made and its myriad references and inspirations. What follows is a condensed, edited, and partially translated (from Spanish to English) interview.
Where did the idea for this world begin?
To put everything in context: I began doing theater when I was four years old, and I love working with theater actors. There’s this special energy with them that I haven’t found anywhere else, it’s a sense of community. Growing up in the back stages of theaters, that became my safe place. But I wasn’t going to be a filmmaker, I was going to be a nun.
Wait, seriously?
I was actually going to be a Buddhist nun and I was ready to shave my head, dress in orange robes, and go to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal, where the nuns do kung fu with these beautiful fans.
That weirdly makes so much sense for the film [laughs]
My dad was like, “If that’s what you want to do with your life, I’m going to support you,” and my mom was like “you’re crazy, you have to finish high school.” She went full-on Latina mom, like “you have to turn eighteen first”. I turned eighteen, said I was going to Nepal and had everything ready to go be a nun, and then she told me: “Do you really think that being locked up in a monastery in Nepal is going to help you reach more people with messages of love than through your films?” And she was right.
I had already done a couple of shorts in high school, and wanted to do film, but I was also disenchanted with the material world in a sense, having all these existential questions. She said I should apply to one university and if I got in there, it’s where I was supposed to go. So I actually applied, ended up going to a university in California, and was there until 2020 during the pandemic when my parents went crazy because the world was ending and had me come back to Colombia. It had already been like six years and all my friends were in LA, I had no one left in Colombia because I was a very weird kid.
You found your people and then they were gone.
Exactly. It was a double existential crisis because I was alone in Colombia and I was actually going to shoot my first feature in 2020 but had to cancel because of the pandemic. Then I got locked in my room for twenty days because we didn’t know if I had COVID or not and one day I called a guy that I knew still worked in theater circles in the city and begged to get me a group of actors to work with before I went nuts. He got me a group of very talented young theater actors that had never done film before but were really into learning and open to experimenting, so we began meeting through video calls.
I had just turned twenty three and we began video calling without expecting it to become a film. We began playing. It was a workshop that I did on acting on film where I asked them to create a character they’ve always wanted to play and a character that would help heal something from their life. They brought this personal stuff and I mixed it with this imaginarium of Cali, my city in Colombia, from another dimension. I called it “retrofuturistic tropical punk”, but we had a Brazilian programmer at Sundance [Ana Souza] who called it “tropical steampunk” and I was like perfect.
And then I actually began dreaming about this world. It was the pandemic and I had these weird vivid dreams of me being in this other dimension, with El Boticario and Erato, almost like a devil and a fallen angel. They spoke to me like they were my guides, and Boticario spoke to me directly, which is why he’s breaking the fourth wall in the movie. Erato communicated with me telepathically and that’s why they’re the narrators of this story. They were my guides through this fantasy world and I kept dreaming about it night after night. I kept meeting new people and took that, mixed it with what the actors gave me, and we began doing improv exercises where I tailored it to see what potential crossover could exist between the characters.
I called it “retrofuturistic tropical punk”, but we had a Brazilian programmer at Sundance [Ana Souza] who called it “tropical steampunk” and I was like perfect.
Gala del Sol
There’s so many connective tissues in the film between the entire cast of characters.
That’s why I say it’s a film that was made upside down – first it was the actors and then the characters [laughs] – but it was also the first time for a lot of us dealing with death and illness during the pandemic in our early 20s. So naturally the character that crosses all narrative lines is La Flaca, who is death personified. With her, I asked myself, “What would happen if I could bet years of my life against death?” In future projects, I’d love to keep bringing back characters from Babel and expand on that.
It already feels like a complete world that you can explore freely.
That’s what I wanted and I’d love to keep expanding the characters; maybe we see Boticario again, or maybe we see Darla and do a film about how Darla built the House of Experiment.
So a lot of this came from your dreams and from the actors, but there’s also so many references to different religious stories and concepts. It’s even down to some characters, like Jacob being Jesus Christ and there being an ostracized trans woman named Magdalena [after Mary Magdalene]. How did you approach pulling from that source and blending that into these existing characters?
My true passion is comparative religion. I started studying Christianity, Judaism, and Islam when I was eleven years old and then studied the religions of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the esoteric traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, like Orphism and Neoplatonism, and The Pythagoreans as well; all these different traditions that I found really fascinating. And, of course, mythology, which I see a lot in how we interact, because mythology is the key to the psyche.
Of course there’s also [Joseph] Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and these recognizable archetypes mixed in, but I wanted to create a new mythology that was relatable to us. How do we make this more contemporary? How can we make this current? So you get Thanatos, you get Delos and Delfos who are oracles, there’s Pythia, Cerberus, and Charon. Something in the subconscious mind of the audience recognizes these archetypes.
I love playing with the surreal and the subconscious. I love surrealist painters and you can see a lot of that visually in the movie. My favorite painter is Remedios Varo and her painting Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente) was the one that inspired the first shot of the film.
Yes! I thought about Leonora Carrington while watching; she’s my favorite.
I love her as well! And they were best friends, right? There’s so much richness in Latin American magical realism and their traditions, and I’m very happy that we’re seeing it in film now. We’ve done a lot of sociopolitical stuff, but there’s another face as well and Babel comes from this group of 20-something year olds talking about what they’d love to watch in cinema, what they haven’t seen before in Colombian cinema, and what themes were relevant to them. Some of those are still very much taboo too, so we decided to tackle that. Let’s show the world that we’re more than Narcos and poverty and all these things that have been exploited. My city, Cali, is always depicted with narcos and I want to show this other face that is just as prominent and relevant.
I feel similarly about the kind of Mexican cinema that gets praise, but, because you’re talking about showing another face: are a lot of the places featured in the film actually places you guys all go to?
So actually Babel itself is two clubs. Espacio 10-60, which in real life is a techno club and in the script I call the “nuclear aquarium” because it has the octopus painted on the wall with the astronaut. That and Gian Salai’s office is also there in reality. The other place, the cabaret, was La Topa Tolondra Nightclub, which is this iconic salsa dancing place. My Little Pony was a real motel too. We intervened a little bit with all the locations, but that’s there if people want to go have fun with their partner, spend the night in the polar room, the Egyptian room, lots of masochistic rooms. For the rest of the locations, we built sets.
I’m very architectural and location based because my dad, my sister, and my grandfather are all architects. My dad and my grandma are also painters and I’ve realized that a lot of my projects revolve around places, like the main character of Rains Over Babel is a location and everything happens inside. We rented a 1920s dilapidated art deco building and built sets on every floor.
That’s so wild. You basically made Sleep No More but for a film production instead of something to walk around in. Obviously that theatrical production sort of allows the audience to follow all these unique characters and threads at their own leisure, but for the film you have to be the final decision maker for who to follow and how much of the actors goes into the film. Since you talked about balancing what the actors want and what you want, how do you balance what comes from which person?
Well to give you an example: the character of Jacob, his mom is a very devout Christian and he always wanted to be a drag queen but never had the courage to do that. And the actor told me that through the film he was also able to realize that, and he was learning from talented drag performers like Roma and Darla. They’re both theater actors as well and the persona of Darla came through a class exercise and now she’s one of the biggest drag queens in Cali. And, in the film, you have the House of Houston and that’s a real life queer foundation. So they taught Jacob and built the character to be very healing in a sense.
Babel pulls from a rich history of mythical and religious storytelling and that actually feels magical, a rarity in a cinematic landscape that so often leans into dull realism instead.
Juan Barquin
The same happened with other actors: Uma, who is played by my best friend from college (Celina Biurrun), was healing her inner child and that’s why we built a character trying to save her daughter. Dante was one I wrote before meeting the actor, but the actor’s grandmother had died months before and he told me that a lot of the stuff Doña Elba says to him were things that his grandmother said to him. He didn’t get to say goodbye to her so it was very cathartic for him. It was truly different with every actor how much they brought in.
That’s so lovely to me, giving people a chance to work out their past and heal through art.
That’s what art should be. We have so much wickedness and evil in this world, so I feel that as filmmakers we have a social responsibility to question the quality of the story we’re telling. Is it generating hate? Is it generating love? People are consuming more content than food, like we’re stuck to our screens all day, so what am I consuming and what am I producing?
I think that’s present in the film; there’s this throughline of people loving and being loved, trying to accept and help one another, and others who just can’t express themselves. But just to jump back to inspirations, I’m so curious if there were any specific filmmakers you were drawing from, because the film is so aesthetically gripping.
So my favorite filmmaker is Emir Kusturica, and he’s a big influence on the film. From Latin American cinema, [Alejandro] Jodorowsky is a big reference for me, and he’s very much theater based and surrealist as well. I love Guillermo Del Toro, he’s incredible, and I love the style of Tim Burton too, I’m very gothic. [laughs]
As for the cinematography, our biggest influence was Wong Kar-wai – and there’s a wink at the end with the motorcycle shot to Fallen Angels. The cinematographer’s deck was filled with Wong Kar-wai, but I draw a lot from paintings. It’s useful for me to show my production designer paintings of what I want; I want this kind of color, I want this kind of furniture, I’m very specific. My production designer had done like thirty movies in his life and I needed someone with a lot of experience.
Because you need to have someone who can capture your exact vision?
Yes, with a limited budget, this person is going to help me materialize this abstract world that exists in my head. The key was to surround myself with talented professionals and with people that I admire and whose advice I love to take.
Babel comes from this group of 20-something year olds talking about what they’d love to watch in cinema, what they haven’t seen before in Colombian cinema, and what themes were relevant to them.
Gala Del Sol
And based on what you’ve told me it seems like such a collaborative environment and not just you demanding things. Is that what your set is like too?
In the prep period, I love hearing everyone’s thoughts and opinions, even if I don’t know whether or not I’m going to take it, but at the end of the day, it’s still mine and I have a responsibility to be cohesive and make it all make sense. There’s a period for experimenting and also a period for just doing it because we have limited time.
You’re also navigating having to make your first feature which is always a huge deal.
While making the movie, I honestly doubted my career like sixty times. It’s hard, especially when you’re making something with such a specific vision and trying to make people understand the idea of “tropical steampunk” without them seeing it. Getting people to believe in you to get that first feature done is so hard and as a 20-something Latin American woman it was doubly so. And then with a queer film where my main characters are Afro-Colombians? One of my producers was telling me that a lot of people in Colombia thought this film was not going to do well and that they didn’t think people were going to like such a weird film.
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Which is so frustrating because everyone I know who saw it at Sundance loved it. Was it stressful making the film and taking the risk to make something so weird and special when it might end up being the only thing you’re allowed to make?
It’s hard when you know people are not believing in you, but I feel like there’s a hunger for a different kind of movie; movies that are bold and not scared to go there. I just made a movie that I wanted to watch and that I thought I hadn’t seen before, because why would I make something that has been everywhere? So I said why not? I can put all of the stuff I like into the film – so there’s kung-fu fighting, a talking salamander, this mythology, this queerness, the neon lighting, the tropical punk, the salsa.
If this is going to be my first film, I’m going to make something that truly reflects who I am and that reflects my style as a filmmaker. There’s so much discussion around “what’s my style” and your style is just you. Put your stuff in a movie! What kind of movies do you like? What kind of books do you like? What kind of poetry do you like? What kind of paintings do you like? I think the key is just to not be afraid that you’re not going to find an audience. As long as you’re true to your vision and you’re making something that you would like to watch, I feel that you’re going to find an audience.
And have you found that audience?
We’re still on the way, but we’ve gotten an incredible response from people. I feel like there’s something universal in the film, which is the search for identity. We’re all here trying to figure it out. Like [at Sundance] in Salt Lake City, it’s a very Mormon community, so I was worried, but older people kept coming up to me saying they wanted their children to watch this. One girl came up to me and was crying because her mother had kicked her out of the house for having a girlfriend and she was feeling so much guilt while also navigating believing in God and said the film helped her get through that a bit. And I immediately hugged her and gave her my contact info because that interaction made the four years of making the film worth it.
I feel like people rarely expect queerness and faith to go together, so what’s it like being someone who walks in both those worlds?
I feel like there’s no contradiction. For me, God is the place where all contradictions get resolved and we’re on a perfect path that we can’t understand. Unfortunately in the material world we learn through suffering and that’s okay, that’s the way it’s built. During the pandemic I met with an exorcist priest who told me that the reason we’re stuck in the material world is because we feel guilt and that we think we are not worthy of love. Whether that’s self-love, the love of others, the love of God – we all think that we need to be forgiven for some reason, but we just need to forgive ourselves. Once we do that, we’re free, but we have so many spider webs in our heads and are looking at the world through a lens of ignorance. We have to trust, we have to do the best we can.
The world is imperfect and there are always people who are going to be assholes, but they’re on their own path. In my world, on my path, I’m going to do whatever I can to bring more love to the world. The success of life, in my opinion, is to develop a strong relationship with the divine, whatever that relationship means to you.♦
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