Talent Guide

Cristina Kotz Cornejo

  • Discipline:Director, Writer
  • Program Year:Project Involve 2010

Bio

Raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina and the US, Cristina Kotz Cornejo holds an MFA in Film Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in International Relations from the University of Southern California. She is an independent filmmaker whose debut feature film 3 Americas premiered at the 2007 Woodstock Film Festival. 3 Americas has since screened at over 15 venues ranging from Uruguay to San Francisco to New York City, is distributed by Vanguard Cinema and Cinetic Rights Management (Cinetic Media), and was recently sold for Russian TV broadcast. She is the recipient of 2004 and 2007 moving Image Fund Grants from the LEF Foundation and was invited to attend the Sundance Institute’s 2004 Independent Producer’s Conference. Her last short film, La Guerra Que No Fue/The War That Never Was (2004) has screened at over 25 festivals in over 10 countries and is distributed by Ouat! Media. She is currently developing her second feature, Fate of the Unlearned. Kotz Cornejo is the author of an essay that is featured in Filming Difference: Actors, Directors, Producers and Writers on Gender, Race and Sexuality in Film, and is Associate Professor of Film Production at Emerson College.

Current Project

Fate of the Unlearned (Narrative Feature)

Logline

Fate of the Unlearned is a social thriller centering on the life of 18-year-old prostitute LUZ MOLINA and her religious, cancer-stricken older sister LUPE. As they struggle to make ends meet from day to day, Luz' life takes a turn for the worst after a violent encounter on the streets of Mexico City triggers an obsession with the American who comes to her defense. Plagued with guilt and anger, Luz falls deeper into self-destructive behavior while Lupe looks the other way as they try to find a way out of the despair they were born into.