Alexandra Cuesta

Alexandra Cuesta

Birth : , Cuenca, Ecuador

History

Alexandra Cuesta is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works between the United States and Ecuador. Her films combine documentary practices, experimental traditions and visual anthropology. An observer with a pressing curiosity of the world around her, she is interested in documenting the everyday, the ordinary, and believes that cinema is the vehicle to highlight and transcend the poetics of the common experience. Often behind the camera, she finds a connection to the world and to the subjects of her films. She is drawn to stories that exist in the in-between spaces, both in the public and the private spheres - an African poet passing through a Mexican-American neighborhood, the invisibility of bus riders against the massive car culture in Los Angeles, the construction of time in isolated populations spread through the Ecuadorian territory, a self-portrait that narrates the end of a love story, the inner lives of two women of different generations existing in a small town in the Ecuadorian highlands. Her award-winning films Notes, Imprints (On Love), Despedida, Piensa En Mi, Recordando El Ayer, and Beirut 2.14.05, have been presented at the New York Film Festival, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Cinema Du Reel, Palacio Nacional de Bellas Artes, Habana Film Festival, BFI Film Festival, Oberhausen, Courtisane Film Festival, FICValdivia International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Image Forum Tokyo, among others. Territorio (2016), her first feature length film has screened in a number of festivals, museums, and cultural institutions, including the Viennale International Film Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles MOCA, BAFICI, First Look Festival at the Museum of the Moving Image, BAFICI, Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Cuenca, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the III Fronteira Festival Internacional Do Filme Documental E Experimental in Goiania- Brazil, where it received a Special Jury Award (2017), among many others. Territorio was selected among the 25 best Latin American films of 2017 by Cinema Tropical. In 2018 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Film and Video and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and residency. She received her MFA in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts and her BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design.

Profile

Alexandra Cuesta

Movies

Manu: A Visual Album
Manu: A Visual Album
Producer
A meditative film and counterpart to the eponymous album by composer and violinist Bryan Senti, interweaving neoclassical and indigenous Latin American music. Memories document something distant yet also familiar. Manu: A Visual Album is a documentation of the landscapes and traditions of Ecuador that are on the verge of disappearing. Filmed entirely on 16mm, it explores the highlands of the Andes, the coast of Ecuador and parts of the Amazon.
Manu: A Visual Album
Manu: A Visual Album
Director
A meditative film and counterpart to the eponymous album by composer and violinist Bryan Senti, interweaving neoclassical and indigenous Latin American music. Memories document something distant yet also familiar. Manu: A Visual Album is a documentation of the landscapes and traditions of Ecuador that are on the verge of disappearing. Filmed entirely on 16mm, it explores the highlands of the Andes, the coast of Ecuador and parts of the Amazon.
Lungta
Lungta
Director
Notes, Imprints (On Love): Part I
Notes, Imprints (On Love): Part I
Director
An autobiographical collection of instances that describe the action of living in a post-industrial landscape, the end of a love story and the politics of what is private and what is public. The camera, as a device for recording and recollection, goes beyond evoking the past to become a tool for the appearance and exorcism of spectres.
Notas, encantaciones: parte II, Carmela
Notas, encantaciones: parte II, Carmela
Director
An afternoon exercise of piecing together minimal details for safekeeping: my grandmother's garden, her music, recipes for well-being.
Territorio
Territorio
Editor
Alexandra Cuesta cites eternal wanderer Henri Michaux as one of the inspirations for her first feature. It’s curious, then, that the opening sequence of Territorio (the first film Cuesta shot in her native Ecuador) shows us a boat heading for the shore. It is very likely that, to Cuesta, the image of water hides the same connotation than it does to the author of “The Sea of Breasts”: returning home, being sheltered in the mother’s womb. Without detouring from the formal approaches of her previous work, Cuesta traces a journey that crosses the country from north to south, drawing a human cartography in which the aim is to achieve an impossible balance between the foreign traveler’s gaze and the earnest familiarity of those who return home temporarily.
Territorio
Territorio
Director of Photography
Alexandra Cuesta cites eternal wanderer Henri Michaux as one of the inspirations for her first feature. It’s curious, then, that the opening sequence of Territorio (the first film Cuesta shot in her native Ecuador) shows us a boat heading for the shore. It is very likely that, to Cuesta, the image of water hides the same connotation than it does to the author of “The Sea of Breasts”: returning home, being sheltered in the mother’s womb. Without detouring from the formal approaches of her previous work, Cuesta traces a journey that crosses the country from north to south, drawing a human cartography in which the aim is to achieve an impossible balance between the foreign traveler’s gaze and the earnest familiarity of those who return home temporarily.
Territorio
Territorio
Writer
Alexandra Cuesta cites eternal wanderer Henri Michaux as one of the inspirations for her first feature. It’s curious, then, that the opening sequence of Territorio (the first film Cuesta shot in her native Ecuador) shows us a boat heading for the shore. It is very likely that, to Cuesta, the image of water hides the same connotation than it does to the author of “The Sea of Breasts”: returning home, being sheltered in the mother’s womb. Without detouring from the formal approaches of her previous work, Cuesta traces a journey that crosses the country from north to south, drawing a human cartography in which the aim is to achieve an impossible balance between the foreign traveler’s gaze and the earnest familiarity of those who return home temporarily.
Territorio
Territorio
Director
Alexandra Cuesta cites eternal wanderer Henri Michaux as one of the inspirations for her first feature. It’s curious, then, that the opening sequence of Territorio (the first film Cuesta shot in her native Ecuador) shows us a boat heading for the shore. It is very likely that, to Cuesta, the image of water hides the same connotation than it does to the author of “The Sea of Breasts”: returning home, being sheltered in the mother’s womb. Without detouring from the formal approaches of her previous work, Cuesta traces a journey that crosses the country from north to south, drawing a human cartography in which the aim is to achieve an impossible balance between the foreign traveler’s gaze and the earnest familiarity of those who return home temporarily.
Farewell
Farewell
Director
Shot in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles, this transitory neighborhood resonates with the poetry of local resident Mapkaulu Roger Nduku. Verses about endings, looking and passing through open up the space projected. A string of tableaus gather a portrait of place and compose a goodbye letter to an ephemeral home.
Piensa en mí
Piensa en mí
Director
Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.
Recordando El Ayer
Recordando El Ayer
Director
Memory and identity are observed through textures of everyday life in a portrait of Jackson Heights, home to a large Latin American immigrant population. Images of street, people, and daily rituals render passing of time in a neighborhood that becomes a mirror not just of another place, but also of the past. The meaning of home is explored and built upon collective recollection.
Beirut 2.14.05
Beirut 2.14.05
Director
A journey into a foreign country begins with a handheld camera looking through the window of a car. Raindrops in the glass abstract the cityscape separating the inside from the outside. Guided by fragmentation we see mirrors, reflections and shadows. The imminence of danger is at once palpable as it is distant. Shot during the production of Ça Sera Beau (Wale Nourredine 2005), the narrative springs from in-between moments, carrying with it a sense of urgency and chance that render like quick entries in a diary.