Six U.S. Latinx and Latin American film students from Bolivia, Brazil, and Mexico have been selected as finalists in the 2020 Student Academy Awards. The winners of the Gold, Silver and Bronze Medal Awards will be announced on September 15.
Percival Argüero Mendoza from the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City, is a finalist in the Narrative category for international film school for his short film Crescendo. The film tells the story of a violinist who faces a terrible decision when the leader of the string quartet she is auditioning for tries to seduce her.
Brazilian-born filmmaker Elisa Maria Nadal, a student at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München in Germany has been included as a finalist in the category of Alternative / Experimental (for both domestic and international film schools) Prisoners of the Body, a metaphorical journey of human existence using dance as a language. To be alive is also to be in movement, from a symbolic birth, going throw different stages of our corporal experience, the film is a praise to the power of movement.
Two Latinx filmmakers are finalists in the animation category for domestic film schools: Mexican-born director Rodrigo Chapoy from Ringling College of Art and Design, and Spanish-American director Pilar Garcia-Fernandezsesma, from Rhode Island School of Design. Chapoy has directed the animated short Bear With Me, while Garcia-Fernandezsesma participates with her undergraduate thesis Ciervo, about a young girl who holds violence, submission, and independence in an uneasy balance as one morphs into the other.
Mexican-American director Pedro Cota, a student at the University of California, Berkeley has been selected as a finalist in the domestic Documentary category for his short film In Their Fight / Na Lutas delas co-directed with Orion Rose Kelly, about a group of women in Brazil bravely fighting back against growing LGBTQ violence.
Sweet Potatoes by Bolivian director Rommel Villa Barriga from the University of Southern California has been selected finalist in the domestic narrative category. Shot in Durango, Mexico, Sweet Potatoes is based on the life of Luis Miramontes, the Mexican scientist who in 1951, synthesized the main hormone of the birth control pill.
