With a group of friends and friends of friends we made our first film “The Grandeur of Delusions” in 2017. Actors took on secondary roles as sound, light and camera assistants. In New York City I was surrounded by creative and talented people. Those friends, luckily, had been to film or acting school. It was a very experimental, collaborative and perhaps amateurish film. Using some of the same actors in the same roles from our first film, with my partner Mason Rader, writer and editor, we made “The Monkey Head” as a continuation of the story.
I think and work with the mentality of an artist, with an emphasis on happy accidents and creative improvisation as the catalysts for creativity. The very monkey head of the title was discovered in the trunk of the vehicle that was being used to transport film equipment by our director of photography. It was an animatronic toy, a leftover item from his teenage years. The plot took a sharp turn after this discovery. The film was handcrafted piece by piece. It came together slowly over time with some false starts.
I now live in Barcelona with the writer/editor. This film was completed in Spain. I never learned the Spanish language properly. My Mexican-American parents, whose parents never learned English, wanted me to be an 100% English speaking American. It took a Basque woman to teach me Spanish in Barcelona. We were inspired to represent Basque and Spanish speaking characters as well as English speakers in the 1960s and 70s America of our movie. I am of European and indiginous American blood and the product of American and European histories and cultures. Like History and “The Monkey Head” I am a serendipitous creation.
I was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas to a Mexican-American family. I watched movies but I made paintings, prints, ceramics and other crafts. My mother made my dresses and taught me how to do everything by hand. My father was a commercial artist at an army base. He designed and built large parade floats for San Antonio’s Fiesta celebrations every Spring. I went to art school instead of film school at the University of Texas at Austin. I went on to receive my masters in fine arts at Temple University, Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Rome Italy. I moved to New York City. I went to films at MoMA, Film Forum and Anthology Film Archives and I got more and more interested in cinema, film history and visual storytelling.
