'Filmmaker Magazine' Names Columbia Alumnae Among 25 New Faces of Independent Film

Filmmaker Magazine has named Columbia Alumnae Victoria Rivera ‘20 and Moara Passoni ‘20 to The 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2020. Since 2001, The 25 New Faces of Independent Film has been “a dig into the new impulses, ideas and forces that bring both new stories and new forms of storytelling to the surface,” according to Filmmaker Magazine. The list has included early discoveries of Girls creator Lena Dunham, Drive star Ryan Gosling, The Crash Reel director Lucy Walker, Miranda July and Paranormal Activity creator Oren Peli, and Dead Man Walking actor Peter Sarsgaard, among dozens of others.

“We looked at a lot of work, canvassed our colleagues, and tasked ourselves with finding not the obvious names, the ones already bold-faced in the trades, but up-and-comers whose early work impressed and excited us,” Filmmaker Magazine stated. 

Passoni is a New York City based filmmaker. She co-wrote and associate produced The Edge of Democracy (2019). In addition to the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary this year, the film was nominated for best narration and writing by The Critics' Choice Awards and the International Documentary Association.

For much of her adolescence, Passoni was anorexic, an experience she bracingly evokes in her hypnotic and unsettling debut feature, Ecstasy (Êxtase), which premiered this year at CPH:DOX. The film is inspired by the director’s own diaries and interviews with other anorexics to capture the lived experience of anorexia, its social underpinnings and its use as an object of theory. 

“Mixing fiction and documentary enabled me to put the reality of the anorexic body against the often delirious abstraction of anorexia,” Passoni said in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine. “I look at the intersection between sexuality and power, politics and subjectivity, and between those and the psyche. The film is an investigation of the mind as well as the body, and of what troubles both.”

Her work in development includes Cost of Living, a 1960s-set hybrid neorealist film telling a true story of political revolt and the fight for worker’s rights, Corinthians Democracy, a limited series set around a rivalry in the world of Brazilian soccer, and her first full dramatic feature, based on the true story of a New England woman whose life encompassed theater, mental illness and, finally, death by COVID-19. 

Rivera’s major project at the moment is Malpelo, a drama about a grief-stricken female free diver who joins a fishing boat to investigate an ocean mystery. “I’m a diving enthusiast,” Rivera says, “and I had always heard about this island, Malpelo, 500 kilometers off the coast of Colombia, which is the largest congregation site of hammerhead sharks. I became obsessed with the idea of diving there and writing a script about a woman who finds herself on a boat full of men but who feels safer in the water with the sharks.”

Rivera is a New York-based writer and director from Bogotá, Colombia. Her award-winning short film Night Swim, which played Telluride and Tribeca, is more provocative, a darkly lyrical story of three teenage girls who break into the swimming pool of a shuttered Rockaway Beach motel. Her films have screened at festivals such as Telluride Film Festival, FICCI, Tribeca Film Festival, Palm Springs (Winner of Best Student Film Award), FICCI and Bogotá Short Film Festival (four time Jury Awards Winner).

“I have a particular interest in complicated, flawed protagonists who find themselves in moral quandaries,” Rivera said in an interview with Filmmaker Magazine.

In 2018, Rivera was awarded the Student Film Award by the Directors Guild of America for her short film Verde. In 2010, she was the recipient of a National Board of Review Award for her short film In the Dark. She was awarded a Sloan screenplay grant for her feature script Malpelo. The project went on to participate in Film Independent’s Fast Track Film Market in 2019. Most recently Rivera participated in Film Independent’s Screenwriting Lab as a 2020 Fellow with her script Malpelo, and was awarded a Gigadgets production grant for her thesis film Lucia.