Everything Else is Noise

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

EVERYTHING ELSE IS NOISE   ***

Nicolás Pereda

2026

IDEA:  When a two-person documentary crew arrives at an apartment to film an interview with a cellist, the situation devolves into a comedy of errors.

BLURB:  So much is effaced in a piece of art: the time and money spent, the physical and mental exhaustion, the dog that was incessantly barking in the neighboring apartment while the power kept going out. The latter are just some of the contingencies folded into the creative fabric of Everything Else is Noise, a dryly irreverent doodle of a film that celebrates the noise that goes along with art-making, and living. Pereda presents two artistic disciplines and philosophies not so much clashing as rubbing in droll counterpoint. In a clear gendered dichotomy, there are the women cellist-composers, who seem not to take their craft too seriously, and the male documentarians, a well-intentioned but bumbling pair who like to intellectualize their subject matter. The guys are essentially flummoxed by the stoic, impenetrable host Teresa (a truly mischievous Teresita Sánchez), the unforthcoming interviewee Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas), and Teresa’s smirky adult daughter Luisa (Luisa Pardo). Their questions about inspiration and music theory are continually met with answers that undermine their lofty, romanticized expectations, most hilariously in Teresa’s stone-faced confabulations about synesthesia. All the while, the filming process is thwarted by outside noises and technical issues the women have clearly assimilated as part of life’s own eccentric music. Pereda directs with the blasé whimsy of Teresa and Luisa, using his wide frame to block the characters in deliberate asynchrony and juxtaposing on- and offscreen space so we’re made acutely aware of what we’re not seeing. Both approaches are present in what might be called the centerpiece scene, in which Luisa performs a bizarre cello arrangement for her guests after instructing them to close their eyes. We never see her ourselves, but her noise is remarkable.