[4] After gaining some interest in filmmaking she decided to study film at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos based in UNAM.

As she was finishing the editing of Lola she decided to write a much lighter story and in collaboration with her sister wrote Danzón (1991)[12] which was the second feature to be directed by María Novaro.

The danzón of Novaro's title, loosely translated as “refined ballroom dance,” is simple in nature: Each partner concentrates on completing a perfect square of steps, making eye contact only fleetingly in what amounts to a pantomime of courtship, of male pursuit and female coquetry.

In Danzón she portrays the traditional Mexican dancehall culture, which has strict gender codes and procedures and contrasts it to the port-town of Veracruz.

The film follows Julia Solorzono (María Rojo), a single mother whose only escape is in the popular dance halls of Mexico City.

Her next two features, El jardín del Edén (1994) and Sin Dejar Huella (2000) focus on the idea of Borderlands while still sticking to her theme of females on a journey through Mexico.

This film was not shown on Mexican screens as a result of the recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in which cinema was not protected as a cultural exception.

[15] Without Leaving a Trace (2000) is a road movie that was filmed in a long journey from Ciudad Juárez to the Mexican Caribbean coast in Quintana Roo.

Domingo received the best music award (La Lengua) and won the Grand Coral Third Prize at the Havana Film Festival that same year.

Its story has Dylan who already plays a pirates video game on his iPad, dreaming of Francis Drake appearing to him on a dark and stormy night and telling him he's saved up a treasure for the young boy.

Dylan and his new primary school friends embark on a leisurely hunt to find the treasure trove, which takes them to limestone islands just off the coast.

The film starts off with a view of the subtropical forest and a deep marine blue tropical sky, captured from a van, painted light blue, taking six-year-old Dylan and his family to live in Barra del Potosi, a stunningly quaint beachside chalet community behind a sandbar on Mexico's Pacific Coast.

[18] Tesoros is thoroughly lit by bright warm colors and an eye for a palette of blues and yellows and standout reds that transfer the soft tones of the seascapes to open door houses, even a school, whose walls and shelves are spangled with lively toys and students’ paintings.

Azul Celeste (1987) is a 40-minute short that was originally part of the movie “Historias de Ciudad” (produced by the Department of Cinematographic Activities of the UNAM).

[16] Novaro has said that the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Theodoros Angelopoulos inspired her narrative style particularly the way she sees her film story as poetry and not dramaturgy.

[19] The recurrence of themes such as motherhood, female friendship and absent males provides an establishment of the protagonist turning to her fellow women for help and guidance.

She is currently reworking “La Lista”, a script that won the 1996 Cosme Alves Neto Award in Brazil for the best Latin American screenplay but never had the chance to film.

In 2006 he founded (along with a group of young filmmakers who graduated from the CCC and his former students) the production house Axolote Cine which to date has produced “Los Últimos Cristeros”, “Wadley” and “El Calambre”, by Matías Meyer, “Tormentero” and “Cephalopod”, by Rubén Imaz, “Strange but true”, and “Malaventura”, by Michel Lipkes, “Calle López” by Gerardo Barroso and Lisa Tillinger, “Mosca” and “La Nación Interior”, by Bulmaro Osornio, “Las Marimbas del Infierno”, by Julio Hernández.