(From left to right) Rebecca Adorno, Isabel Castro, and Faye Ruiz
By Yessenia Sánchez
Filmmaker Magazine has released their ‘25 New Faces of Independent Film 2021’ list, which showcases twenty-five new independent filmmakers who are rising to the top, creating buzz, and making powerful statements through their artwork. Featured on their list are three Latinx filmmakers worth keeping on your radar: Rebecca Adorno, Faye Ruiz and Isabel Castro.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Adorno is a New York-based editor, camera operator and artist. She received a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Puerto Rico and an MFA in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City where she graduated with the highest honors in 2010, receiving the Paula Rhodes Award for Exceptional Achievement in Computer Art. In 2016 she was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Picture Editing for the VICE Special Report documentary Fighting ISIS.
The majority of Adorno’s work focuses on vérité and archival heavy, character-driven stories. She was an editor on the nine part HBO documentary series The Vow and worked on three seasons of the Emmy-award winning series VICE on HBO. Among other projects, she edited the feature length documentary Residente, which was an official selection at SXSW 2017, and was a recipient of the Inaugural Jonathan Oppenheim Documentary Editing Award at Sundance 2021 for her work on the vérité driven documentary film Homeroom. She currently works between New York, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico, or, in her own words, “anywhere there’s a good story that needs to be told.”
Faye Ruiz is a filmmaker based in Tucson, Arizona. Her filmmaking is guided primarily by her experiences as a Latinx trans woman, and her interests lie first and foremost in uplifting the stories of trans women of color, unraveling the stereotypes, falsities and all things that flatten the lives of these women as they often exist in fiction. In her work, she aims to express the nuances of the trans experience that are contradictory, messy, fun and human. Above all else, Ruiz is driven to find new ways to push the boundaries of what trans narratives can mean and how they can be represented on film.
Her senior thesis from the University of Arizona, a 10-minute short film titled The Lights Are On, No One’s Home, follows a trans woman (played by Ruiz) who returns to her hometown after running away years before to find that everything she once loved has eerily disappeared. The film found a home at various festivals, premiering at BFI Flare 2021 and going on to screen at Outfest and the Palm Springs Film Festival. It was also featured in Who Will Start Another Fire, a collection of nine short films from emerging directors compiled by Dedza Films, a distribution initiative that platforms filmmakers from underrepresented backgrounds. The shorts program enjoyed a theatrical release this past June with the support of Kino Lorber.
Ruiz is perpetually fascinated with the convergence of history and myth, noting: “I think it’s interesting to explore the fantasies of our lives—how they clash with the reality of what’s going on, and also how they allow us to survive.”
Born in Mexico in the early 1990s, Isabel Castro is a multimedia journalist and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. Her directorial debut Crossing Over (2015) won a 2015 GLAAD Media Award for Best Documentary Film and Castro worked on the Emmy-award winning series VICE on HBO and VICE News Tonight on HBO. She produced, lensed and co-directed the documentary short USA vs Scott with Ora DeKornfeld, a film that explores the legality and ethics around humanitarian aid for migrants.
Castro is an Artist-in-Residence at Concordia Studio and an SFFILM/Catapult Fund Fellow, and is currently working on post-production for her feature film Mija, which follows Doris Muñoz, a music manager who supports her family by discovering young Chicano musicians. Although principal photography began in the fall of 2019, the subsequent pandemic drastically altered her subject’s life and, perhaps unexpectedly, brought Castro’s recurring interest in capturing immigration injustices to the forefront again.
For more information on these emerging Latinx filmmakers, as well as the other 22 new independent film faces of 2021, be sure to check out Filmmaker Magazine’s full list here!
