What makes a woman want to kill a bull – and risk being killed by one? The documentary Ella Es El Matador, by Celeste Carrasco and Gemma Cubero, follows the paths of two female bullfighters: established matador Mari Paz Vega and aspiring matador Eva Florencia.

We swapped emails with one of the film's directors, Gemma Cubero, and talked about naked bullfighting, feminism and what compelled them to make Ella Es El Matador.

Why bullfighting?

The idea for the film came when Celeste and I were living in San Francisco in 1999. We read in the New York Times that the only known female matador of the 1990’s, Cristina Sánchez, was quitting because other male matadors at the top didn’t want to share top billings.

This sparked our interest and we decided to research what was behind the news. What we found fascinating was to realize that not only Cristina, but also many other women throughout Spain’s history have tried to be matadors but they have been forbidden to do it by law for moral reasons. From this point on we knew we had a powerful, untold story.

Bullfighting is the quintessential symbol of masculinity and bravery in Spanish culture. For us, born and raised in Spain, making this documentary about female matadors means changing this symbol and shifting the gender roles that have been defined for centuries. It has also been a personal journey of exploring and questioning our culture.

What attracted me to the subject matter is the connection that these women have to the animal, their courage and their determination to pursue what they love.

What were your views about bullfighting before you made this film? What were they after?

Neither Celeste nor I liked bullfighting and yes, it was hard at times to watch certain aspects of the bullfight. We were not anti or pro- bullfighting, we simply did not understand it. However, when we started the project we became fascinated with these questions – why would a woman want to be a matador? What do they feel in the ring? Why do they do it? In the last nine years, we have gained tremendous respect for the protagonists of our film. Now we are shocked to find ourselves in the position of wanting to see Maripaz’s future fights!

Did you encounter as much resistance as female filmmakers as the female bullfighters?

Yes, there is a parallel story here. As a first time filmmaker we have also faced great obstacles, had to be determined to move forward despite the obstacles and believe in ourselves. The struggle was less in terms of gender and more in terms of getting funding for a controversial subject matter. In terms of getting access to the bullfighting world, it’s a very closed world and there were many male bullring managers who refused to speak with us about the issue of female matadors.

What's a bigger barrier, being a woman in the sport, or not being wealthy enough to afford fighting?

Both.

You need money to train, to pay for the bulls, for a crew for the suit of lights and for the equipment. You can pay to fight if you have a lot of money, but that is not the way to really become a matador. More important than money is a good manager who opens all the doors. Originally, bullfighting was a way for working class people to climb up the socio-economic ladder with the hopes of being “discovered” by a manager who would nurture their talent. Its not enough to be rich, you have to have the connections.

Bullfighting is a very tough and closed profession for men. One of the biggest barriers for men is having money and a manager that will do the work of promoting and networking well. For a woman, not having money and not having a manager that will believe in her talent becomes a double burden.

If Maripaz Vega could get one of the top Spanish managers to promote her career, she would be fighting with the top matadors.

For a woman is not enough to be in excellent shape physically and mentally to fight, it is not enough to have money, you need to have a manager or apoderado that will believe in your talent and help you open the doors to the main plazas.

Do women in Spain see female bullfighters as feminists?

No, I don’t think so at all. Bullfighting is a passion that you are born with. Very few people have this desire and the determination to pursue it. Women, in particular, face so many barriers that the passion has to be so great. Female bullfighters are seen more as rarities than as feminists.

Once a woman is in the ring and proves herself, women spectators do tend to be more supportive of her and her right to bullfight since they are aware of the barriers they have had to overcome to be in the ring.

Why was Eva Florencia fighting a bull naked at night?

In old times, when apprentice bullfighters wanted to be close to the bull and didn’t have access they would jump fences to dance with the bull in moonlight, simply enjoying being there with the animal. Eva loved this history and had represented this in one of her paintings. It was a renegade act of romance.

It was Eva’s idea during the last shoot when we had almost finished the film. In hindsight we know that she had thought to retire since she had gone through her lowest point in bullfighting, but she hadn’t expressed that yet to us. That last night of our shoot, she told us that she had always had this desire to fight naked under moonlight and asked if we would do it with her.

We agreed and waited a month for the next full moon. She arranged everything and designed a white cape so that it could be seen under the moonlight. We went to the south of Spain and Celeste shot the scene at 3 AM with a small digital camera and no lights. It was a very intimate moment and our role was just to witness her experience. We didn’t even know if it would go into the film, but in the end it was the purest representation of Eva’s connection to nature and the bull. It was the purest representation of her romance and dream. This naked bullfighting under the full moon was the last time that Eva ever fought.

Will bullfighting still exist in 50 years?

In Spain there is a great deal of people who want to stop bullfighting. However, bullfighting is very rooted in our culture and in many other countries such as Portugal, the South of France and Latin America. Also bullfighting has a business component that we cannot ignore. Bullfighting generates about 1.7 billion dollars a year and draws more than 50 million spectators each season. The money-making aspect of this business along with how rooted Bullfighting is in Spain and Latin America make us believe that bullfighting will still be around in 50 years.

Watch Ella Es El Matador online right now on PBS.org through October 2.

In 1995, Robert Rodriguez made Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas famous. After the success of Desperado, the Mexican-American director went on to make the blockbusters Sin City, Once Upon a Time in Mexico and Spy Kids.

His latest, Shorts, is about three kids who have fun with a rainbow rock that grants anyone wishes – until it falls into the wrong hands. The movie was written with the help of his 10-year-old son, Rebel, who also plays "Lug" in the film.

We took a trip down to Rodriguez's Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas to talk about pochos, the '80s and video games.
How do you go from Sin City to a kids movie?

Cause they're not that far apart… they're all fantasies. I'm a cartoonist and it's not that different to have kids with jet packs on Spy Kids from having guys in Desperado shoot missiles from guitar cases.

If I made movies like Shorts and then made movies like Se7en, that would be totally schizophrenic.

Do you feel Mexican or American?

I grew up Mexican-American so you're kind of unclaimed by both sides in a way.

Which is kinda nice, because here, it's like "Oh, he's a Mexican director." You go to Mexico and it's "Oh, he's a pocho." That's why a lot of my movies take place at the border. I like that you have one foot in each side. You can make a very American movie or you can make a very Latin movie because you've got the best of both.

Do your kids movies have an '80s bent?

There's a playfulness to all my movies that kind of stems from that era. I remember that being a very magical time for me. I think it was a great decade for imaginative film making. That's just always kind of stuck with me.

Do you show your kids movies from when you were a kid and tell them: "Hey, this is what I was into when I was your age"?

Yeah, one of my sons loves Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark – I thought that would be too dated for them, but it holds up really well. They can't get enough of those movies.

Do you think texting, video games and/or the Internet make kids less creative?

[Laughs] Well, my sons tries to run as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog and he runs into walls.

The more knowledge you have about technology the less limiting it is. If all you know about technology is turning on the computer and playing this one single game, that's a limit you're putting on yourself. You can do so much more with that computer.

That's what is hard. A lot of parents don't know how to use it, so they can't really teach the kids.

My parents were really savvy, my dad lent me his VCR when I was 12 – he didn't even know how to hook it up – and I was filming movies and taping shows. No one at my school had anything like that. I couldn't even believe this thing existed. Now my kids are doing that to me, showing me how to do things and I'm like "How'd you figure that out?"

Your kids speak a little Spanish, right?

Yeah, Elizabeth (Rodriguez's ex-wife) has always spoken to them in Spanish. I would speak in English so they would also learn. We knew they would learn English in school so we spoke mainly Spanish. I didn't speak a lot of Spanish in my house because my parents used it as a secret language with each other.

Raul Julia once said in a speech: "To know two languages it to have two souls." So I was like: "Wow, that sounds pretty cool, everyone would like to have a second soul!"

Things don't always translate, so we wanted our kids to have two souls.

Shorts is in theaters this next Friday, August 21.

Jason Perez dreamed he would die before he turned 21. His dream came true. A former drug dealer on the streets on New York, Perez says "Jason" died when he became Muslim. Now known as Hamza, the Nuyorican rapper and family man spreads the message of Islam through his music.

The movie New Muslim Cool documents Hamza's journey: moving from New York to Pittsburgh, educating his family about his new-found faith and raising his children Muslim in post-9/11 America.

We hooked up with the director of New Muslim Cool, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, to chat about the film.

Hamza and Suliman said they learned to make Puerto Rican halal food. What did they eat?

The meal they were cooking in that scene was arroz con pollo with halal chicken. There’s a grocery store in Pittsburgh where they can get halal meat but in a pinch they – like many Muslims – will also use kosher meat. I think they’ve figured out to make lots of traditional boricua dishes halal-style, even mofongo with halal chicken. And for them fish is all okay, so fortunately that means Hamza’s mom Gladys can cook her famous bacalao, which I always hope and pray she’ll be making when we are visiting.

Hamza grew up in NY with a large Latino community. Was there a comparable Latino community in Pittsburgh? Did he seek to find one?

Yes, Hamza and Suliman were born in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and then moved to Worcester, Massachusetts as kids. Both of those towns have huge Puerto Rican populations so they always had their own culture around them.

But Pittsburgh does not have that many Latinos yet, that has been a little hard for them on a cultural level, although that is beginning to change. As a matter of fact, when Hamza and Rafiah’s son was born last year they joked that they just doubled the Puerto Rican population of Pittsburgh!

When you set out to shoot this film, did you want to focus on Muslim life in America or Muslim music in America?

I was really interested in examining Muslim life in America through the music. It seemed to me that hip-hop culture would be a great metaphor for who we are as a nation and a world, where there is lots of mixing and re-mixing of elements that come from different places to form a coherent whole.

How did you meet Hamza? When did you decide you wanted to center your film around him?

I had met Hamza and Suliman in the research phase of the film but I really connected with them on the first round of filming, when we were in Chicago to shoot a Muslim festival on the South Side called "Takin' It To The Streets." It’s held every two years and always features lots of Muslim hip-hop performers. So we filmed Hamza and his brother performing as M-Team with their flaming machetes, and then the next day did an interview with them.

In the interview they both impressed me hugely with their wit and sophistication and warmth, and I asked if we could film them at a later time in Pittsburgh. A few months later we went to Pittsburgh and met their community and it was just so obvious at that moment that the story was there – with the chance to dig more deeply into a universal story about family, faith, and coming of age in America today.

Why did Hamza convert to Islam?

Hamza says that he kept searching for happiness as a young person but he couldn’t find it. He tried the life of the streets and drugs but that just made him more depressed. His roommate and fellow drug dealer disappeared for a few months, and when he came back Hamza saw how changed he was and how happy he seemed. So he made the decision right then and there to change his own life.

Did Hamza make an effort to teach his kids about his Puerto Rican roots?

Hamza and all of his extended family are very close to their Puerto Rican roots and they all teach the kids about their culture and heritage. His grandmother and several cousins still live in Puerto Rico, so they come to visit a lot and bring reminders all the time of their roots. And his wife Rafiah is learning more and more Spanish and how to cook with adobo!

Did your notions about Islam/Muslims change after shooting this film?

Oh for sure. I didn’t know anything about Islam before making this film, and like most Americans really only started thinking about Muslims after 9/11 happened. So I think I had to learn that a lot of the labels that we use about Muslims, like categorizing them simply as “moderate vs radical” or “Muslim vs American,” really are overly simple or just inaccurate, and strip people of their humanity. I also learned to have a lot more respect and understanding for people who choose to follow organized religion, whether it’s Islam or Christianity or Judaism (or another path).

And we all definitely changed by working so closely together for three years, learning to accept more and more that we can all be so different and yet have so much in common. All of us on the crew and production team – Muslim, Jewish, Christian, atheist, Latino, black, white, South Asian – gained new friendships and deep new levels of trust for each other. Maybe that can be on some microcosmic level what we could do as a society or even a world, if we could just be able to see each other as fully and completely human despite coming from different religions or cultures or economic classes.

New Muslim Cool airs this Tuesday, June 23, on PBS.