Monica Pena
-
Watch for 48 Hours: Spider Veins and Hearts of Palm from the East Oregon Film Festival
With the East Oregon Film Festival underway this weekend in La Grande, Oregon, Filmmaker is happy to once again host the festival online selections here at the site. Starting now, for 48 hours, you can watch Monica Peña’s haunting and haunted relationship mystery, Hearts of Palm, preceded by a short, Frank Mosley’s multi-layered psychological drama Spider Veins. From the filmmakers, here are their two short synopses: Spider Veins: Two women reunite in a quiet neighborhood before a party begins. But by turns mysterious and shocking, the film’s narrative begins to unravel even as the women’s relationship teeters on the edge of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 21, 2016 -
Film as a “Spiritual Memory”: Writer/Director Monica Peña on Her Miami International Film Festival Premiere, Hearts of Palm
Writer/director Monica Peña obliterates the notion of sophomore slump with her second independently produced feature film, Hearts of Palm, which will have its world premiere at Miami Dade College’s Miami International Film Festival tonight. With this movie, the Miami-based Cuban-American filmmaker has only advanced her avant-garde exploration of film narrative, which she first introduced us to with Ectotherms in 2014. Whereas her first film examined the lives of four Miami youths trapped in suburban anomie, her latest takes on a more personal subject: love turned sour. Both films are strongly rooted in Miami. The first contains allusions to the plight […]
by Hans Morgenstern on Mar 9, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Monica Peña’s Hearts of Palm
Miami-based filmmaker Monica Peña’s debut feature, Ectotherms, was a provocative discovery out of the Miami Film Festival that scored a great review in Variety from Guy Lodge and which announced Peña as someone to watch. Just dropped, then, is the teaser trailer to her second feature, Hearts of Palm. Suitably mysterious and with arresting imagery, it is described simply as “a love story told through science, literature, and music, invoking Miami’s mystical undercurrents.” For more on Peña, read her interview with Sarah Salovaara about the distribution of Ectotherms. And, if you’re in Miami, join me, Peña, Jillian Mayer and Carla […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 28, 2015 -
Dispatches from CPH:DOX and Borscht 9
International Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival – CPH:DOX 2014 by Pamela Cohn There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains. They are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way. Our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves, the stories we continually re-categorize and refine. This sort of sharing — this communion — would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified and seen as private, exclusively ours. —from Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s film The 50 Year […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2015 -
Born Out Of Necessity: Monica Peña on Ectotherms and its Immediate Post-Fest Streaming Launch
For most filmmakers, having a feature on the festival circuit is bookended by anticipation. There’s the nervous feeling that no one will ever agree to show the film, then the nervous feeling that the screening will go over terribly, followed by the anxiety-addled wait to hear from a distributor that your film will make it out of the enclave and into the public. For her debut feature, Ectotherms, a no-budget take on four Miami teenagers ambling across their sun-blasted landscape on the way to a black metal concert, Monica Peña decided not to make waiting an option. After the film’s […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Apr 4, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Ectotherms
Ectotherms is the feature debut of Miami-based filmmaker Monia Peña, and it mixes fiction, documentary, the Miami landscape and black metal. Peña was influenced, she writes, by Cuba’s “Imperfect Cinema and many derivations of realism,” by her collaborators as well as by the people she met along the way. The suitably mysterious trailer is above, and here’s the synopsis: ECTOTHERMS: organisms that rely on external heat sources When teenager Chelsey finds her grandmother dead, she knows life without the old Cuban woman who raised her will never be the same. So she skips school with her brother Cassidy and his […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 14, 2013
