#1 *Culture-making and exploring migration narratives - In conversation with Amada Torruella

My first guest on Film & Impact is Amada Torruella, an indie filmmaker from El Salvador. She is a community storyteller and film curator. Her work is driven by visual literacy, environmental justice, the healing of our migration wounds and culture making with an emphasis on collaboration and experimentation. Amada explores collective memory, intergenerational trauma, dissonance and the Global South.

We met at IDFA in November 2019 and we immediately connected. She is someone who gives a very big place to community, collaboration and experimentation in her work. Her work has been featured at festivals like the New Orleans Film Festival* and IDFA and her  latest documentary Tamales Y Tunas premiered at the Black Star Film Festival this August - so she’ll be telling us a bit about this very touching film in this conversation.

Amada is based between El Salvador and Los Angeles, but as a borderless human, she creates her own ecosystems while nurturing community-driven spaces. She is a member of Brown Girls Doc Mafia and she’s VONA Voices alumni.

Today she’ll also be talking with me about culture-making, growing as a migrant filmmaker and discussing how indie filmmakers from around the world are transforming documentary aesthetics and storytelling structures.

*Correction: Amada’s work has been featured in festivals like the New Orleans Film Festival, not the Los Angeles Film Festival mentioned in the intro.

Connect with Amada:

Twitter @amadatorruella

Instagram @amadatorruella 

Watch the conversation here: https://youtu.be/_q9R9YEOd8s