Latinx filmmakers Paloma Martínez and Sebastián Pinzón Silva have been selected in the 2018 class of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine. The Houston-based Mexican-American filmmaker Martínez and the Colombian-born Chicago based Pinzón Silva have been included in the magazine’s prestigious list of up-and-coming indie filmmakers.
Martinez has directed the short films Crisanto Street and Enforcement Hours (retitled Sanctuary City Hotline for its inclusion as part of the The New York Times’ Op-Docs documentary shorts). After studying economics at Boston University, she decided to make a career move and focus on filmmaking, enrolling in Stanford University’s documentary film MFA program, from where she recently graduated.
As reported by Filmmaker Magazine, Martínez is currently planning a nine-month move to Mexico City to develop a new project. “I’m looking for stories of bicultural twenty-somethings who grew up in the United States undocumented and had to move back to Mexico because of a lack of opportunity here. Because of their great English skills, a lot of them are working in customer call centers servicing America and have to navigate this real conflict of identity. There are so many gray areas of the law, so many people who couldn’t be reached by DACA, so many lives lived bi-culturally, and I’m hoping to pursue these stories” she said.
Pinzón Silva grew up in Bogotá, Colombia and he studied photojournalism at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Georgia, and moved to New York City for five years, where he work for for commercial/music video director Bob Giraldi. Palenque, his thesis film for the two-year documentary media program at Northwestern University, had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival last year. The short film, about the communities founded in 16th-century Colombia by Africans who had escaped slavery in the United States, Pinzón Silva is currently living in Chicago, where he works as a freelance cinematographer and editor. He’s planning his next film to chronicle a ghost town that’s been consumed by the forest.
