Directors' Bios
ANNA BODEN (Director)
Anna Boden moved from her hometown of Newton, Massachusetts to New York City in 1997 to study cinema and English at Columbia University. On a short hiatus from school, Anna helped develop a filmmaking course for students in the Talent Search program, a program for first-generation college-bound youth.
RYAN FLECK (Director)
Ryan Fleck moved from Oakland, California to New York in 1997 to study filmmaking at NYU. His student film Struggle, detailing a racial confrontation on the set of a film about the life of former Black Panther Assata Shakur, received the Carl Lerner Award for Social & Humanitarian Significance and also screened in the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck began their artistic collaboration in 2002 on documentary short Have You Seen This Man? The short won several festival awards, premiered on PBS in 2003, and airs regularly on the Independent Film Channel.
Their most recent short film, Gowanus, Brooklyn, premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded the grand jury prize in short filmmaking. It also screened at New Directors/New Films in 2004. Gowanus, Brooklyn was based on the feature-length script, Half Nelson, which Anna and Ryan co-wrote and developed at the Sundance Screenwriters’. It will go into production over the Summer of 2005. Filmmaker Magazine recently named Ryan and Anna two of the 25 New Faces of Indie Film for 2004.
Jóvenes Rebeldes (Young Rebels) is Anna and Ryan’s first feature-length project.
Natalia and Elena Levin, two sisters forced to separate as teenagers in 1975, right after Natalia’s militant boyfriend Martin was disappeared by the military dictatorship, reunite in 1984 in a country foreign to both of them. Natalia, who has been living in exile in Spain, travels to visit Elena, who has just moved to suburban Texas with her husband and son.
Toro Negro gives deep insight into the life of Fernando Pacheco, a bullfighter in the Mayan Region in southeast Mexico. Fernando is heart-warming and honest, but also an alcoholic, violent and impulsive. Pedro González-Rubio and Carlos Armella follow, almost from the character’s inside, and sometimes with a disturbing closeness, Fernando Pacheco, a.k.a El Suicida (The Suicide), a young bullfighter who fights not in big arenas but at popular parties of small Mayan communities in the Yucatán Peninsula.
From the acclaimed filmmakers of the feature films Half Nelson and Sugar, Young Rebels follows five Cuban hip-hop groups and two producers over the course of a Havana summer. Battling onstage or at home, the characters’ personal travels collide in a summer of explosive concerts, intense debate, unbearable heat and rising tensions as government agencies begin to institutionalize hip-hop’s street roots.
As part of a series of a country-wide airport raids in search of terrorists, Elvira Arellano, a Mexican woman working as a janitor at O'Hare International Airport, was arrested and convicted of Social Security fraud. On the date she was ordered to appear before immigration authorities, she took refuge in a Methodist church where she fought to remain in the United States with her American-born son. Despite her 12-month struggle, she was ultimately deported to Mexico in 2007. 
