Salma Hayek: “It makes me proud that we Latinos did not give up”

By the time she was recognized in Hollywood for the film Frida (2002), Salma Hayek had already founded her own film production company, Ventanarosa. A few days ago she was in the Toronto Festival presenting The Taste of Christmas, which tells three stories of Mexican families.

“We started without a window. We started with a wall that there was no way to knock down. And so, with a chisel, we hit it and a hole began to open. And then, that’s it, the window,” he humorously explained to EFE about the origin of the company. “It gives me great pride to be able to say that what they did not see, that we did see, It was the power of the Latin public. It makes me very proud to say that we never gave up. It was many years. And here we continue. “Consistency is very difficult to maintain,” she said.

The first movie that he released with his production company was the adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Colonel Doesn’t Have Anyone Write to Him (1999). However, his first and only nomination for Oscar It was for Frida, one of her works most praised by critics, but also a film that made her confront the producer imprisoned for sexual abuse, Harvey Weinstein.

When the complaints broke out, the Mexican wrote an article in the New York Times revealing that had been harassed for years by the ex-tycoon. “It was unthinkable that a Mexican aspired to be part of Hollywood. And even though she had proven that idea wrong, she was still ‘nobody’. My greatest ambition was to portray the life of this extraordinary artist and show my Mexico. “I wonder if it wasn’t just my friendship with Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney that saved me.”

Now, as a producer, Hayek will release her recent film in November through the platform ViX. “Hard work is the hundreds of projects that we invented, that we achieved, that we presented and that were rejected. And I think that if we hadn’t done what we did, we wouldn’t be where we are. Not the company, but us as a community. Because many of the times they told us no, they were left thinking.” At 57 years old, we will also see his work as screenwriter. “I just finished one, but we’re on strike, so I can’t even move it. And I wrote a script a long time ago, which I’m going to direct when my daughter is in college. “It’s super ambitious.”