Get to know the work of the filmmaker Indira Cato, the “secret” daughter of Gabriel García Márquez

Indira, 31, was born after the extramarital relationship that García Márquez had with the journalist Susana Cato.

The Mexican filmmaker Indira Cato has captured the attention of the cultural world since it was revealed this weekend that it is the “secret” daughter of the late Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez and the Mexican journalist Susana Cato.

Indira, 31, was born after the extramarital relationship that García Márquez had with Susana while they were writing the script The mirror of two moons (1990), and has “very good relations” with the family of the Nobel Prize for Literature, as he commented this week to Eph Gabriel Eligio Torres, writer’s nephew

But Indira has forged her own career in Mexico, where she was already known for participating in the script and producing take my loves (2014), a documentary about Las Patronas, the group of Mexican women who, since 1995, feed migrants who travel on La Bestia, the train that goes from the Mexican southeast to the United States.

“The biggest challenges we faced making this film was getting support, since it is a debut feature and getting support outside the Mexican state to make a debut feature production is very complicated”, he expressed in an interview at the Querétaro International Documentary Film Festival in 2015.

A filmmaker with a social outlook

Indira studied Dramatic Literature and Theater at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with a specialty in Design and Production, according to an invitation from the Ministry of Culture to a workshop that “the documentary film producer” gave in 2020.

He has also written film reviews for the site Butaca Ancha and collaborated on the book Political cinema in Mexico (1968-2017), according to Correspondences: cinema and thought, a cultural magazine with the support of UNAM.

He has also collaborated in the Mexican magazine Process as the author of the column “Puro drama” and on special assignments, such as an interview with the former Uruguayan president Jose Mujica.

The filmmaker also directed the short film in 2018 How great are you, magazo!, with a script written by her mother in which a magician grants the wish of a young woman who asks “for the bad government to fall”.

Now, he is working on a documentary about Choral Olympia, activist who originated in Mexico the so-called Olympia Law against digital sexual violence, as revealed in an interview in April 2021 with the YouTube channel R7D/Rentauna7d.

“It deals with very current and very urgent issues, and I think that does help and there is an awareness of that, that feminism is at its best right now, that we women in Mexico are quite fed up, that there are urgent issues of attention of violence”, commented.

Despite her work as a filmmaker, few interviews have been given by Indira, who has so far not responded to requests for EFE.

Even so, throughout his career he has highlighted the importance of telling stories of people without privileges and about social problems.

“Our film is a call to hope, we have always wanted to present it that way, we believe that it gives us the strength to see that something can be done and that there are people who are already doing it”, told the Mexican Film Institute (Imcine) in 2014 about take my loves.

Susana: art and revolution

Indira has also inherited her mother’s artistic talent, Susana Cato, born in 1960 in Mexico City.

Susan is the author of Them: The women of ’68 (2019), a book that collects the testimonies of Mexican women involved in the student movement that marked the country 50 years ago.

She is also the author of the biography of the actress Mary Red. from movie (2010) and from Isjir: spoken portrait of an Iraqi migrant (2020).

Similarly, he has written radio and television programs, short stories and plays, among which the work The madhouse outside (2016).

She has been a reporter and film critic for Proceso.

Indira, presumably named after García Márquez’s admiration for former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, bears her mother’s surname because it was Susana who “made the decision not to take the surname García Márquez,” according to Gabriel Eligio Torres.

García Márquez had two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, with his wife, Mercedes All, who also died in Mexico City in August 2020, and according to the journalist Gustavo Tatis, the writer’s family and friends kept Indira’s existence a secret for years “out of respect for Mercedes Barcha and loyalty to Gabo.” (I)

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