Otilia Portillo Padua is a documentarian who focuses on the relationship between humans and the environment. Her latest feature, Daughters Of The Forest, is causing a stir during its festival run. The cosmically charged film examines fungi and how traditional harvest tactics of yore and modern science can help each unlock the benefits of mushrooms and the like.
Film Threat: You studied architecture at university. When did the transition to filmmaking take place?
Otilia Portillo Padua: One of my first loves was genre cinema; it was much later that I understood it was a language. In a similar way, you later learn and understand a language of architecture that is beyond just representation. Since I was young, I was playing with the medium of cinema, and I did the same in architecture school. The filmmaking seed was there before I even started university. Using cinematic language while studying architecture, without some of the constraints of “traditional storytelling,” was liberating in many ways but also challenging. Architecture raised my awareness about different structures, spatiality, and how body movement relates to space and time. Some critical texts in architecture include “Sculpting in Time,” where Tarkovsky discusses his work, and “In Praise of Shadows” by Tanizaki.
You have mentioned that “mushrooms found you” as you were searching for a counterbalance to the terrible news of the day. How exactly did fungi find you?
Mushrooms found me when I was feeling a little bit lost and impotent in the face of the world, but they also found me because I wasn’t really looking for them – I also wasn’t trying to make a film about them. I wanted to make a “carrier bag” film, inspired by sci-fi writer Ursula K Le Guin’s text “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” There, she discusses the anthropologist Elizabeth Fischer’s theory that the carrier bag, and not the sword, was the earliest tool of human civilization.
In her text, Le Guin reflects on how the hero’s linear journey didn’t reflect her experience as a woman or the stories that she was interested in. Instead, she preferred stories that resembled containers, vessels, or carrier bags rather than arrows.  She was interested in what she refers to as a strange realism that corresponds to a strange reality. Once I started looking into the contents of carrier bags, there were so many surprises, and one of them was mushrooms. They had always been there, but I hadn’t learned to look carefully.

“Fungi were on the planet long before humans, and will prevail long after we are gone.”
Going off that same idea, what of Lis and Juli’s scientific endeavors had you known about prior to starting production on the film?
I knew a little about Lis’s collective through some general online research I did about women collectives working with fungi during the pandemic. The Hongueras Pjeikakjoo collective was founded in 2016, which is also the year they started doing mycological tours in the region. Since then, they have grown tremendously. I didn’t imagine the magnitude and ramifications of the project until I met Lis and her grandmother. As for Juli, I met her through the scientists at the Mycology Lab, at the College of Postgraduates in Texcoco.
Daughters Of The Forest transcends time to illuminate what fungi have done and what they can do for the environment and people. When in the production did such a cosmic scale come to be?
Thank you for this question. I did actually think a lot about the cosmic scale. I always wanted to portray a different time, a time beyond and prior to the human timeline. Fungi were on the planet long before humans, and will prevail long after we are gone. And if you believe they come from outer space, then time acquires this cosmic scale. But to be completely honest, I didn’t know how to do it. It was in the process of making Daughters Of The Forest, and multiple discussions among the team, that we started trying to work out how we could use cinematic language in our favour and how speculative fiction and sci-fi could help us situate the film in different times.
What inspired you to make a documentary with a science fiction flavor?
This question is connected to the first and the last question. I have always been inspired by the possibilities of genre, and by how they explore human “truths” while, at the same time, being acts of imagination that defy the material reality we live in. When I start a project, I always do the exercise of thinking of it as a literary or cinematic genre: where would it fall, what rules, what devices would you need? Can they help the story find its “truth?” There is a particular sci-fi genre that focuses on the non-human and other forms of knowledge, not only on the hard sciences or technology. This seemed to be the natural genre for this film. Mushrooms are already pretty sci-fi when you think about them. No wonder there is so much speculation and mystery around them.