Five Latinx directors have been selected in the 2020 class of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. Mexican-born Daniel Antebi, Brazilian-born Moara Passoni, Colombian-born New York-based Victoria Rivera, and Mexican-American helmers Iliana Sosa and Joie Estrella Horwitz, have been included in the magazine’s prestigious list of up-and-coming indie filmmakers.
Born in Mexico City to a Jewish family, Daniel Antebi spent his youth shuffling from Miami to London, and eventually settled in D.C. as a teenager. He studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Art and in 2019 his 16mm, one-shot short, A Dios, got the attention of the Sundance Institute, and selected him as a 2019 Ignite fellow. This year, he premiered his short film Soft at SXSW, and he’s currently working in the preproduction of his debut feature film On the Mat, set during the pandemic about two addicts in recovery who want to save the day.
Moara Passoni grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, and studied social science in college, combining them with dance, theater, performance and documentary classes, and philosophy studies in Paris. She worked as an assistant director for experimental filmmaker Kiko Goifman. She enrolled as an MFA student in screenwriting/directing at Columbia University, where she worked on her debut feature, Ecstasy / Êxtase, which premiered this year at CPH:DOX. A hybrid film, it mixes her own diaries and interviews with other people to capture the lived experience of anorexia.
Passoni has also worked as an associate producer on the Petra Costa’s Elena, Olmo & the Seagull and the Oscar-nominated film The Edge of Democracy, as well as a cowriter on the latter. She’s currently working on two new projects: Cost of Living is a 1960s-set hybrid neorealist film telling a true story of political revolt and the fight for worker’s rights, and Corinthians Democracy, a limited series set around a rivalry in the world of Brazilian soccer.
Iliana Sosa is a first-generation Mexican-American who grew up in El Paso, and completed a major in Latin American studies at Southwestern University, followed by an MFA in directing at UCLA. Sosa was approached by Josefina López, playwright of Real Women Have Curves, to direct her first feature, Detained in the Desert, an adaptation of her play the writer self-financed.
In 2014 Sosa began shooting Lo que dejamos atras (What We Leave Behind) in 2014 with the plan was to make an oral history of the memories of a man during his Bracero days, but the film evolved into a patient, rigorously captured portrait of his final years. Financial support took a while to arrive—she now has grants from the Ford Foundation and participated in the Sundance Institute Development Fellowship—and the project is completing editing with the aim of a premiere late next year or in 2022.
Arizonan-born Joie Estrella Horwitz, whose grandmother was from Mexico, is currently finishing her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. She’s currently working on the docu-fiction hybrid Tender Crossings, a story about a family spanning and separated by the border between Mexico and Horowitz’s hometown, Nogales. In 2019, she directed the short film Alejandro y Miguel, a moody, sun-soaked 16mm study of the relationship between a vaquero father and his artistically inclined son. Her nearly completed CalArts thesis film, Green and Brown, focuses on artist and close friend Luchita Hurtado.
New York-based writer, director and producer Victoria Rivera was born and raised in Colombia. She moved to New York to attended the School of Visual Arts for undergraduate, worked as a freelance producer for five years before enrolling in graduate film school at Columbia University. She’s made several works that have gained increasing attention on sites like Short of the Week, as well as from Film Independent, Sundance and IFP, among others. The two most recent narrative shorts, Verde (2018) and Night Swim (2019), artfully build themselves around moments of heightened intimacy between young teenage girls. Rivera is currently working on her debut feature film Malpelo, a drama about a grief-stricken female free diver who joins a fishing boat to investigate an ocean mystery.
