“Everything Else Is Noise” — dir. Nicolás Pereda | 70’ | (film)

Everything Else Is Noise. Cello, Car Horns and Barking Dogs

One apartment, three women at different stages of life, an interview that does not quite go according to plan, male ego and… noise. These are the main ingredients Mexican director Nicolás Pereda uses to build his film.

Noise as a Pprotagonist

The noise of the title emerges from the sounds of the street, fragments of neighbours’ conversations, car horns, barking dogs and the sound of a cello struggling to break through this insistent background. Sound design plays such an important role in Pereda’s film that it has even been described as one of its protagonists. But the noise the women in Everything Else Is Noise have to contend with also has a metaphorical dimension: according to the director himself, it is made up of social expectations and pressures.

Poking fun at artistic pretension

The apartment where the story unfolds belongs to Tere, a composer and cellist. Tere lends her home to her friend Rosa, also a composer, who is about to give her first television interview. From the very beginning, the interview runs into obstacles — and not only because of the noise. There are power cuts, and Tere’s daughter, Louisa, also joins the conversation.

Mother and daughter are sharp, witty and merciless in puncturing the balloon of artistic self-importance, because Everything Else Is Noise is also a comedy about the art world, its hypocrisy and the sexist stereotypes that shape it. In Pereda’s film, the institutional language of art belongs to men: the interview, authority, famous names, status. The women have music, but they also have everyday life — children, the apartment, neighbours, electricity, dogs, conversations and ordinary existence. Noise.

Pereda, however, does not go for obvious jokes. Instead, he builds the story through subtle irony rooted in absurdity, awkward situations and, above all, dialogue — described in one Berlinale review as “the beating heart of the film.”

Eight days of shooting

The film was shot in just eight days. The apartment where it was made belongs to one of the director’s friends and is genuinely located in an extremely noisy neighbourhood — so noisy, in fact, that the filmmakers considered changing locations.

The leading roles are played by actors who regularly collaborate with Pereda as members of the theatre collective Lagartijas tiradas al sol. In Everything Else Is Noise, they appear under their own names. This choice makes the film’s form feel even closer to reality.

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Tickets for individual screenings are available at the box office of the Municipal Cultural Centre (Miejskie Centrum Kultury),
12 Marcinkowskiego St., Bydgoszcz

Festival pass for the entire FONOMO festival