Dear friends,

I have been selected from a highly competitive group of filmmakers for UnionDocs’ Early Production Lab, taking place between July 3rd and August 4th 2023 and I’m currently raising funds to cover part of the program fees.

I am a Peruvian independent filmmaker, editor and writer based in Lima. My work is based, essentially, on researching and exploring. My last film, About Everything There is to Know (2021), premiered at Mar del Plata Film Festival and obtained a Special Mention of the Jury in the Latin American Competition, was also listed among the 20 best Latin American films for Cinema Tropical.

But it was not always like this. Being Peru a country with an emerging film community, where explorations around an alternative cinema are still incipient, it is very hard to locate and gain a space as an author and create a place of enunciation from which – having the real as raw material – I can navigate between representation, mise-en-scène, direct cinema, fantasy or film essay. This polyphony, far from being considered a problem of dispersion, is rather a way of creatively approaching the world, constantly and easily changing tools: editing, writing, the spoken word, the image, the image as word, the word as form.

Now, I am working in this new project called “The Colloquium of the birds”, where archive, real characters and a fable that contains them, aloud me to talk about the actual social and political crisis in my country, about what remains of humanity in our society, and about the utopian idea of build a world that not only provide us with the primary necessities, but also with those that are underestimated: beauty, enjoyment of life, rebellion, poetry.

Thanks to a scholarship, I have managed to finance part of the  travel expenses. But I still need to raise some funds to cover the tuition fees. As a female filmmaker who lives, creates and speaks from the global South, this is a great opportunity to share work with people from other latitudes, to continue learning and deepening my filmmaking practices and to have a space for discussion and exchange on the social and political implications of filmmaking today. If you can contribute with any amount, I would be enormously thankful. 

In return, and only if you want, you can appear in the credits of the film and also, have an exclusive virtual screening of the final version of the film, which I hope will be ready in early 2024.

Previous work:

About the Summer Documentary Labs:

The UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab are a program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Ridgewood, Queens, the Summer Labs offer a platform for participants to spend the Summer making strides and clarify the creative direction of their projects to attract the potential team members, funders and producers they need to find their way to the finish. An intensive schedule of screenings, open seminar discussions, weekly industry “field trips,” and inspiring artist visits from some of the most dynamic voices across the field of documentary, the SUMMER DOCUMENTARY LABS are tightly structured environments that bring participants into a select group of emerging filmmakers to get challenged and encouraged to think through every aspect of their works-in-progress.

Drawing inspiration from across disciplines, this intensive program should not be mistaken for an industrial, journalistic, or traditional documentary training. Scholar Scott MacDonald highlighted in The New York Times that, “UnionDocs has a healthy sense that the older definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’ cinema and what constitutes ‘documentary’ are up for grabs.” Much emphasis is placed on workshopping lab participants’ writing about their projects as a way to both clarify the creative direction and attract potential team members, funders and producers. Participants receive focused, honest and helpful feedback on their project proposals from prominent documentary artists and industry experts.

The Early Production Lab in July is for projects about to go into production. Filmmakers have already likely shot some of their material and have access to their subjects and are looking for ways to strengthen their media samples, and pitches and work through the ideas as they approach the production stage and plan for the entire process all the way through to distribution.