Cinematographer Carmen Cabana’s reel is a varied trove of genres and forms that are all linked by an ability to visualize emotion on scales both intimate and magnificent. Her camera operation and DP resume spans stylized, sweeping action and thrillers, lush romantic dramas, and fresh, poppy shorts. And that’s all before she became head DP for two shows featuring messy, flawed, and intensely individual female characters whose internal states Cabana made tangible to viewers: Tanya Saracho’s modern-day Chicanx fairytale “Vida,” and Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka’s gender-flipped, queer reboot of “High Fidelity.”
Cabana, who first started exploring visual storytelling with playful home videos starring her family, is ruled first and foremost by story and character. As she told Variety in a video interview in July, “filmmaking is about getting creative, getting resourceful with what you have and making it work no matter what, because what matters is the story. Because once you get the characters and the story, everything [else is] technicalities.”
In addition to the technical prowess and expansive vision needed to execute the high-stakes action of projects like the Netflix hit “Narcos,” and Danny Trejo-fronted “Bullet,” Cabana brings high-octane ideas down to a personal level. Her eye for creative emotional projection, and her emphasis on story and character, allows her to center complex and dynamic characters in their own tangled inner life while they move through a compromised external world.
Initially, the Colombian-Venezuelan Cabana began her official film training at the Art Institute of California as a writer, but when classmates would ask her to shoot their projects because they thought she “had a good eye,” she became more interested in cinematography, as she told American Cinematographer. After completing her degree emphases in screenwriting and post-production, she formed her own personal curriculum by reading up on as much contemporary cinematography literature as she could. It paid off, earning her an opportunity to shape the Mexican drama “Cartas a Elena,” and be spotlighted as a Rising Star of Cinematography in 2017 by American Cinematographer. While Cabana protests that her writing was always far inferior, her background and insight still heightens the intensely character-driven work of both Seasons 1 and 2 of “Vida,” and “High Fidelity.”
“Vida,” which was Cabana’s first chance to build a series look from scratch, tells the story of two estranged sisters (Mishel Prada and Melissa Barrera) whose mother’s death prompts them to return to their childhood home in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. They begrudgingly start to unravel their inheritance, both physical and spiritual, and contend with what their presence as “Chipsters” means in a rapidly gentrifying city. Cabana used both handheld camera to home in on, among other things, the trauma and flint locked within older sister Emma (Prada), and aerial shots to capture the scope of impossible questions of identity and debt in a city under forced change.
In order to create a palette that would serve the magical realism present in Chicanx storytelling, and to respect the story of colonization “written all over [Latinx] skin tones,” showrunner Tanya Saracho chose Cabana and production designer Ruth Ammon carefully, Saracho told International Cinematographer’s Guild Magazine. In the same article, Cabana talked about her focus on reflecting the world the characters were exploring, infusing the show with the natural colors of East Los Angeles, the “melancholy” from its fading public art and transitioning night life, and experimenting with different gels to emphasize the actors’ and characters’ diverse backgrounds.
This thoroughly planned fascination with lighting and visually shaping inner life carried through to Cabana’s next project. In the canned-too-soon “High Fidelity,” Cabana’s exploration of character shows up both in her use of distance and color. Sharp foregrounding bars Rob (Zoë Kravitz) from focusing on anything outside her own impossibly fast brain, and enhancements of the colors of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, provide a down-to-earth background for Rob’s emotions to silently and not-so-quietly spiral. As she told Variety, Cabana invoked filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s uses of color as inspiration in distinguishing “High Fidelity’s” geographic and emotional personalities, but it is clear that Cabana is also building off her own growing history of visual intuition.
Cabana’s upcoming projects include thriller “Nocturne,” from Zu Quirke, and boxing documentary “Teofilo.” Both are now in post-production.
You can watch all three seasons of “Vida” on Starz, and the first and only season of “High Fidelity” on Hulu.
