In Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca squeak for joy upon encountering a dolls’ house feast. It’s only when Tom Thumb tries to cut the Ham that he realises it’s made of plaster. Nothing can be eaten, thus all must be destroyed. Alma frequently sites this story as a source of inspiration.

Alma’s work plays with the thin line between reality and illusion. A white hand projects the shadow of a bird on the wall, but really it’s just smoking a cigarette; a ceramic ashtray contains the residue of a night that never happened. For each element of honesty - beautifully rendered cigarette ash next to a mouldy lemon - there is a lie. The shadows are never innocent and the olives can’t be eaten.

During pre-production, as we were gathering ideas in an interview with Alma, she told us that she loved exploring the Mexico City markets and buying all the miniature objects she could find. We decided that it was important to include these miniatures in our films. When filming Alma in her studio, our camera operator made use of cinematic macro lenses to capture closeup details and a slider to move around the macro set design she created.