FILMMAKER STATEMENT

Another short portrait shot by me as a demo for the cinematic portraiture class that Ghetto Film School teaches in partnership with The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. The creative prompt for this cycle, “Nuestro Pueblo,” references the foundational Indigenous, Californio and Spanish settlements from which Los Angeles got its name: “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles” or “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels.” As designed by Teaching Artist Kyle Provencio Reingold, the 2022 project focused on the importance of preserving and documenting our city through a lens in order to understand the rich, diverse, and complex cultural fabric of Los Angeles.

Featuring a lecture by famed photographer Reynaldo Rivera and screenings including Robert M. Young's ¡Alambrista!, Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Woman, and Errol Morris' Vernon, Florida, this course pushed students to explore the boundaries of what portraiture can mean in the context of documentary, narrative and experimental film and the various combinations thereof. For their final project, the filmmakers shot their short films on 16mm stock using Bolex cameras. For me, it was an opportunity to try out more tools offered by this legacy technology and I added an in-camera fade in and a double exposure to my repertoire.