The Vilcek Foundation has announced this morning the recipients of the 2021 Vilcek Foundation Prizes, celebrating outstanding immigrants, and individuals who are champions of immigrant causes in the United States, which include two Mexican filmmakers: Rodrigo Prieto and Juan Pablo González.
Prieto has been awarded the Vilcek Prize in Filmmaking for his virtuosity and versatility—the sheer excellence and inventiveness of his work across styles and genres—and his central role in creating some of contemporary cinema's most indelible works.
Juan Pablo González has been announced as the recipient of the Vilcek prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking for the artistic rigor and deep emotional engagement that he brings to his immersive and intimate explorations of his hometown in rural Mexico.
Born in Mexico City, Prieto explores the mix of cultures and immigration that have contributed to his heritage. He identifies as Mexican and American. His father was born in Mexico City and lived in the United States from ages 2 through 12. His parents met while studying at New York University, and moved to Philadelphia briefly before moving to Mexico City after the birth of Prieto’s older sister.
As a child, Prieto had a love for science fiction movies. With a Bell and Howell 8-millimeter camera lent by his father, he experimented with making his own films: stop-motion animations with clay figures he and his brother Antonio crafted, and monster movies they would project onto a sheet in their home to create haunted houses for their friends, to their delight.
At the age of 19, he began working with the photographer Nadine Marcova. Through his work with the studio, he discovered the joy in composition and lighting. Prieto enrolled in the Centro de Capacitación Cinematografica, in Mexico City. As a student, he was excited by the opportunities for experimentation and the creative challenges that cinematography provided. With lighting, film chemistry, framing, and editing, he found a set of tools that he could use to bring the emotion of directors’ visions to life.
Since 1999, Prieto’s cinematographic skills have led him to work with a cadre of leading directors, including Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ang Lee, Oliver Stone, Julie Taymor, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. Prieto has been praised for the flexibility of his approaches to the craft of cinematography, creating compelling images across a range of styles.
Hands-on in his approach, he experiments with lighting, filters, and film chemistry to achieve maximum visual impact. He brought unflinching hand-held camera approaches to Amores Perros, Babel, and Argo, immersing the audience in the intimate experiences of the protagonists. He brought the spirit of surrealism and magical realism to Frida, re-creating many of the artists’ paintings for film through layered exposures, and the application of light, texture, and paint to force the viewer’s perspective. In Alexander, Prieto made the bold choice to use color infrared film stock to film the Battle of the Hydaspes; the stunning visual results of this choice lend a phenomenological quality to the pivotal scene.
Prieto brought a subtlety of visual tone across four decades of story in Scorsese’s The Irishman; to evoke the sense of memory as the film is narrated as the recollection of Frank Sheeran, Prieto meticulously referenced and emulated Kodachrome and Ektachrome film stock exposure and color reactivity to create a palette in the finished film that recalls photographs and films of the era. His work has garnered three Academy Award nominations and three BAFTA Awards nominations for Best Cinematography.
Born in Atotonilco el Alto, Jalisco, González grew up amid the ranching and agricultural communities in Guadalajara. He majored in communications at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) prior to working in animation and in advertising. González credits the experience of studying at UT Austin as being deeply influential on his filmmaking; the expansive Latin American studies program there, set in the political landscape of Texas, compelled González to consider voice, power, and history in Latin America, and the power he could wield as a documentarian and filmmaker.
Through his feature documentary Caballerango and short documentaries like Las Nubes, La Espera, and ¿Por qué el recuerdo?, González explores grief, community, family, and politics. As a documentarian, González’s approach is subtle, but direct. In seeking to capture “content that expands the life of the characters” the director films extensively, observing his subjects as they go about their day, as they tell stories, or as they have conversations over work. Now as a faculty member at CalArts, González seeks to share his insight and vision through mentoring young filmmakers.
