'Bardo's' Alejandro G. Iñárritu on the Personal Tragedy That Inspired Film

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is, arguably, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's most personal film yet, as he told Newsweek how the personal loss his characters try to grapple with was something that he, too, has been through with his family.

The Netflix film, which is released on the platform on Friday, December 16, follows Mexican journalist Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) who returns to his home country after living in Los Angeles with his wife, Lucía (Griselda Siciliani), and children for many years.

As well as dealing with a feeling of estrangement, Silverio and Lucía are struggling with the loss of their first child, a son named Mateo, who died shortly after birth. This storyline was one that the Oscar-winning director drew from his own life, and the experiences he and his wife, Maria Eladia Hagerman, had gone through.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu on the Personal Tragedy That Inspired 'Bardo'

Silverio and Lucía's loss is depicted in one of the film's opening scenes, in which the doctors tell Lucía that Mateo does not want to come out of her womb because the world is too difficult to live in.

While presented as a dream-like sequence, the scene is meant to represent the characters' son's passing, and the film charts Silverio and Lucía's journey to accepting the tragedy, and their grief and healing. It was a personal experience that Iñárritu felt he was ready to address onscreen.

"I think when you have an experience like that, it's already hanged. I think everybody that has lost a close person in your life, no matter if it's your son or it's someone close, it's unexpected or natural, [or] suddenly, that loss, in a way, it just impregnates your life with [the] fragile nature of it," Iñárritu told Newsweek.

"You understand that things happen, and it happened to us very early in our marriage, and I think that has been something that, [over] the years, we have now been able to understand it and assimilate it, and can relate to it in a different way because we have been, obviously, taking perspective and time has passed.

"And, now, I felt strong enough to really express this thing that has been an important part of our life experience emotionally, that has obviously affected us in different ways, and express it with tenderness and intimacy and, at the same time, even with some imagination in order to make a metaphor, a representation of what that journey has been."

The Birdman director explained that he felt he could now share the experience "with no fear, with no shame, or with no pain," adding: "I like seeing it in the lightness of an experience that happened, and I was ready to do that.

"And it was a very liberating feeling to see it in the perspective that I am in, and it came from a very intimate need to share something like that with my wife," Iñárritu added.

Iñárritu said that Bardo "is a very introspective film" but isn't autobiographical, despite the similarities between him and Silverio. Like the fictional journalist, the director also felt a similar way to his character when he immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico.

"That emotional conviction of having left our country, Mexico City, as a family 21 years ago, that double nature of the existence, [those] demands when you emigrate, requires reinvention, requires integration, but requires [it] through disintegration," Iñárritu said.

"You have to leave something behind so it is to die a little. To emigrate is to die a little and, with distance and time, that becomes very blurry," he added.

"This film attempted to grasp, or express, this very dislocated feeling that when you [leave] your roots and you are trying to integrate this double nature, [it leads to] that space between one nature and the other, one reality, one self and [the] other self that, in a way, are debating their identity so it's about fracture."

"So, yes, the immigrant experience is something that [is] a massive, I will say, trigger in this film. It's an intimate film that, at the same time, has these other aspects," Iñárritu added, reflecting on the historical events depicted in the film like the colonization of South America by Spanish conquistadors.

"As a Mexican, when you leave your country, you bring all that country has given to you; the story of the country, our mixed-race nature by the conquest is something that is an open wound, the disappearance of the people that's happened—120,000 people disappeared in the last few years— that has shaped me, and millions of my country fellows, or the American invasion of the American Mexican War.

"So, all these epic, historical things are part of myself and those have been shaping me and my Mexican fellows, no matter where you are [or] how many years you are away. Those are things that shape you as a human being," Iñárritu said.

'Bardo' Is Not Supposed to Make Sense

When viewers tune into Bardo on Friday, they may be surprised by the sporadic nature of the storytelling, as the movie jumps from one seemingly unconnected plotline to another through the eyes of Silverio.

It may not seem like it makes sense, but that is entirely by design, because the film is supposed to have a dream-like quality to it, Iñárritu said.

"The things that I was exploring are very particular from my own experience, right? What I have been going through the last 21 years is something that only I have been going through, as a Mexican, as a father," the Amores Perros director said.

"So, in a way, all of these themes and experiences that I have been going through are very personal, the way you express them [...] there is no recipe, there [are] no guidelines, it's not a genre."

Iñárritu didn't want to approach the film in "a conventional way," and he added: "There was no structure deliberately, so you start putting together memories and emotions, and dreams, and feelings, and regrets, and joy, moments too, and then the work was, 'How am I going to make sense of this mess?'

"It was just to throw out things and then be truthful and honest, the most honest you can be with that, and then try to really blend it in a cinematic experience. That was the [focus] so it's scary because there's a big risk that it could work, or not.

"I think there is nothing to be understood in this film," the director added. "There is no plot. There is no 'who kills who?' I think it is just a sensorial dream."

Iñárritu went on to describe the film as an "experience cinematically that people, if they allow themselves to navigate and do not demand logic—because logic does not have any place in a dream—and have confidence in the film experience that [they] will navigate [and can enjoy].

"The second time you [watch Bardo you] will start getting all the threads, and all the things that make these [storylines], if it works, why it works, and if it doesn't work, maybe you will find why it's not working," he added. "But I think the second time is a very interesting experience."

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is out on Netflix on Friday, December 16.