LOS CABOS, Mexico — This year’s Los Cabos Festival couldn’t have gone much better for editor-producer Fernanda de la Peza. Two films she is producing participated in the Works in Development section, Amat Escalante’s “Estado del Imperio” and Joaquín del Paso’s “The Hole in the Fence,” the former winning the CTT Exp & Rentals post-production award and the later the CTT Exp & Rentals + Chemistry Award, one of the competitions weightiest prizes.
De la Peza started her career as an assistant director, but is best known for her work in editing. In fact, she won an Mexican Academy Ariel for editing on Amat Escalante’s Venice competition winner “The Untamed.”
While her workload as a producer has increased, she has no intentions of cutting back on editing. “I really love the combination of these two jobs,” she told Variety. “I think editing gives me a particular vision towards production, so it’s a great combination and I want to keep doing both.”
Whether it be editing or producing, de la Peza knows what she’s looking for in a film she wants to work on.
Related
“It has to be a project I really like because I’m very close to all the creative processes. That’s why I chose to work with directors that have very particular visions. Kind of auteur films, it’s important to me to follow the director, to bring to life their projects,” she explained.
In addition to the two projects at Los Cabos this year, De la Peza is also producing the debut feature of another accomplished editor, Natalia Lopéz, titled “Supernova.” The film is a coming-of-middle-age tale about a woman going through a divorce, who questions her roles as a mother and wife while trying to find herself as an independent woman.
It’s a film about identity, a topic that has garnered a great deal of attention in recent months as many Latin American women working in the film industry hope to move away from being labeled based on their gender or region, and would prefer to be recognized for the roles they fill.
“Recently I was talking about this at diner with a group of women in the industry,” she recalled. “We were saying that we don’t like to be treated as special. We don’t need special help. We don’t want to be hired because we are women or get support just because we are women. We want to be considered the same as men, on the same platform. We want to speak through our work and have equal access to work.”
Ignoring any labels, it’s still safe to say that Fernanda de la Peza is a talent worth following.