Today we’d like to introduce you to Isabela.
Hi Isabela, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
Life goes in cycles, or in circles or in spirals if you like. So, even if we retrace our steps, like Alice in Wonderland, the same place never looks or feels quite the same. My story starts in Lima but I don’t remember it because we moved to South Miami when I was three when I started Junior Kindergarten. I remember going to school in Coconut Grove and the pastor having us sing ‘Day by Day’, which was beautiful, a sung prayer. He had a little embroidered cloth on a scroll that he would unfurl, and there were the words of ‘Day by Day. It was a song of humility and patience. A song to make you live in the present, whose ideas really guide me still today.
As far as I can remember, I loved to sing, dance and invent stories that, when my brother and sister weren’t available, I would make my dolls enact, with highly melodramatic plots. As soon as I could draw with some dexterity, I began designing clothing and costumes, from the front, the back and the side views. I took musical theater, ballet, tap, jazz, voice and piano. My grandmother taught me the basics of composition, proportion and color in drawing. I loved drawing portraits, making up dances, imitating people’s accents, reading aloud in a funny voice, anything that was an absorption of the world around me.
My world was somewhat broken at 13 when I was sent to boarding school, but I accepted because it was close to New York, which seemed to contain the maximum expression of my theater and movie dreams. Although unhappy at boarding school, I was grateful that it gave me the opportunity to study in China when I was 15. Living there was so exotic and fascinating that when I came back to the US, I decided I would never study or do anything else other than film. I made my first film when I was 16, the story of a girl trapped inside herself at boarding school. I didn’t have to go far to find material.
I carried coffee and made PB&J sandwiches for Darren Aronofsky on the set of Requiem for a Dream when I was 17 and then did undergraduate studies of Film and Television at NYU Tisch. The studies featured some colorful characters that I wish I could imitate for you, but the most enriching experience was studying Comparative Literature with Kamau Brathwaite, a great Barbadian poet. His work and his ideas of Caribbean cosmology went straight to my heart. Perhaps it was then that I first realized how growing up on this edge of the Caribbean that is Miami really made a deep impression on me.
In the decade after college, I lived and volunteered in Sri Lanka for a few months, which I edited later as “Letters from Colombo”. For seven years – a full cycle – I lived in Paris, did intermittent production and translation jobs, completed a master’s (the European film and TV market) at La Sorbonne, and began writing music one day without any prior preparation. I released my first EP in and my made my first music video “Gentle Man” filmed in a boat on the Seine. Then, my son was born and I went to find roots in Latin America.
Once in Chile, nestled in a familiar surrounding where my son would be coddled and cared for, I worked as a production coordinator in advertising, as a content creator for a newspaper and released my first album Girl with No Country, made my first dark comedy ‘Night of the Living Data’ which later did well in Austin and Chicago Indie Festivals. But I still had so many screenplays in the works. Since 2014, when I shot Night of the Living Data in LA with fellow Miamian, Nick Puga, and DP Karina Silva (another Miamian!) I wanted to make my feature Success en tu Life.
When the riots in the streets began in Chile in October 2019, I knew it was time to go home to Miami – and quickly – to make my first film. The pandemic broke out in March 2020 but I still managed to shoot an excerpt of the film (that you can see here www.successentulife.com) which we then created a fundraiser for. We’re slated to begin filming part of it in the spring of 2022. The best part about being in Miami is that it inspired a slate of 2 more films with the same flavor of comedy, with Latin/Caribbean leading women and stories of their self-realization.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
As many have mentioned, in a very concrete fashion, the pandemic has postponed our filming, but it would be dishonest to blame the pandemic for anything in my life, really. My greatest challenge in the past or obstacles to realizing my cinematic dreams has been the fear of failure, of losing money, of not believing that I’m worth whatever people want to invest in my productions, and I believe a lot of it is due to gender disparity. Men are taught to be risk-takers and trailblazers. Women are taught to be steadfast and reasonable as the primary caretakers. There is also a notion that art or film isn’t a worthy pursuit, or at least, it isn’t until it makes you a handsome profit, but the series of failures creates the success, and I believe this so deeply that it is the lesson of my first film.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
One of the projects I’m most proud of is the financial risk that I took in filming a music video on Easter Island. It was a song from my album Girl with No Country (2016) that I loved, inspired by an old Samoan courtship dance called Sau Sau. Inspired by the dance that I saw my first time in Easter Island in 2007, I wrote the idea for the music video right when I wrote the lyrics to the song and I could hear the melody in my mind. In 2019, took out a small loan (that I paid for the following two years) and went to the island for three weeks during my son’s summer vacation to Easter Island, The greatest risk was bringing a very young but extremely talented Director of Photography from Australia to film it. I wrote the song, performed it, starred in the music video, produced it and directed it. The experience cured me of wanting to star in my own productions.
I don’t know if I’m completely unique in what I do. Many artists write, direct, edit, produce, sing, dance, act, design, etc., but I think I have a particular story to tell about the perspective of a mixed Latin and American culture, which is so deeply chauvinistic, not really because of the men, but because of the women who raise them to be so. I have a provocative side. I have a sly humor. It’s more elbow-to-the-ribs than pie-in-the-face. I want to make people laugh. I adore entertainment. Singing and Dancing. I believe that laughter is the most powerful weapon against hatred, sadness and violence, and many comedians who are my heroes have proved it over and over again.
What were you like growing up?
Growing up, I was a sponge, obsessed with all forms of culture, without any filter or prejudice. I loved MTV, Madonna and Whitney Houston as much as I liked Shakespeare and Mozart. All these things were part of my world: my father who played Chuck Berry songs and who loved Richard Pryor and Mel Brooks was an enormous influence on me and my mother who loved Ella Fitzgerald and modern art was also an important aesthetic influence on me. I remember distinctly watching movies with my family and whenever there was a funny scene, I would turn immediately to look at them to see their reaction. Did they laugh? Did they like it? Were they enjoying it? This is funny to me now because it’s a basic of being a director. You have the character utter the line or the punchline, and then you cut to the reaction of the character. If you stay on the person who uttered the punchline, it doesn’t work. In a way, I was already “cutting” my life together.
I’m enormously grateful to my after school theater teacher, Alejandra Bunster, who first told me that someone who enjoys doing all the things I do – writing, acting, drawing, etc. – is called a director.
Pricing:
- We’re still looking for $50,000 to finance Success en tu Life – does that count?
Contact Info:
- Email: isabel@abuelacontent.cl
- Website: www.abuelacontent.cl
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isabela.productions/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/isabela22music
- Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/isabelisamused
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/isabela22music
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/isabela22music
Image Credits
Pictures of Success en tu Life behind the scenes by Ginny Dixon. Picture of Sau Sau cast in Easter Island by Paul d’Indy. Cover photo art of Conocerte by Isabela. Storyboard drawing by Isabela.
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