Director Joel Alfonso Vargas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2024 on the basis of his short film, Mad Bills to Pay, which is now a debut feature selected for both the 2025 Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. “A shoestring-budget production” realized by a “minimal team,” Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) is also a debut feature for producer Paolo Maria Pedullà, a UK National Film and Television School graduate whose previous work includes associate producing Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God as well as shorts and various high-end TV shows. Below, Pedullà discusses […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 10, 2025Reflecting in 1983 on her early years at a literary agency, novelist Isabel Colegate ruefully recalled writing reader reports that involved ”mostly explaining in detail why the typescripts concerned were quite unpublishable, falling as they did so very far below the standards set by the world’s greatest literature, which in my ignorance of there being any other standards I was applying to them. My reports must have been deeply disheartening.” There are two tones at work here: one a rueful regret at her past self’s lack of charity, the other a reminder that if we’re not striving for greatness on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 28, 2025Joel Alfonso Vargas’s breakthrough 2020 short, Target Is Hiring, has as its leads two “showtime” kids who breakdance mid-car while blasting their own music, a familiar NYC subway routine that generally unfolds before indifferent or outright hostile everyday commuters. This year’s Que te vaya bonita, Rico (May It Go Beautifully for You, Rico) similarly first identifies its main character by an occupation specific to the city. Rico (Juan Collado) hawks nutcracker cocktails (a mixture of liquor and fruit juice heavy on the latter) on the beach and lives at home with his mother (Yohanna Florentino) and sister (Nathaly Navarro). The […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024