Mexican filmmaker Juan Pablo González has been announced as the 2022 recipient fo the True Vision Award presented by the True/False film festival, dedicated to a director’s dedication to the advancement of nonfiction filmmaking.
González was born in Atotonilco el Alto, Jalisco, Mexico, and his home region has become the focus of his filmmaking practice, acting as the location for all of his work to date. As a filmmaker, he seeks to reclaim the medium to counter colonial narratives and center the voices of rural Mexico—building alternative histories to those that seek to frame its communities as being locked in stasis, or as victims of circumstance.
González’s work spans fiction and nonfiction, and he often collaborates with real people from his life to reflect their own reality on screen. His films seek to explore community, grief, globalization, and the changing nature of Jalisco as a place. All of his work shares a beautifully cinematic aesthetic and, with a patient lens and care for his subjects, Gonzalez’s commitment to telling these stories is clear in every frame.
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. His most recent film, his debut fiction feature Dos Estaciones had its world premiere few weeks ago at the Sundance Film Festival where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award presented to its protagonist, actress Teresa Sánchez.
In 2021, González was awarded with the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Filmmaking awarded to immigrants in the U.S. with a legacy of major accomplishment in the biomedical sciences and the arts and humanities. An MFA alum of the University of Texas at Austin in Film and Media Production, he currently serves as Co-Director of the Film Directing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.
Launched in 2004, the True/False film festival takes place annually in Columbia, Missouri, with a particular focus on nonfiction cinema. Its True Vision Award was first presented in the inaugural edition of the festival, and it 2019 was presented to Spanish-Mexican director Nuria Ibáñez. The 2022 edition of True/False will take place March 3-6.
