Director Frank Pavich specializes in films about the creative spirit. His last feature film, Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), tells the story of the avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most ambitious project. It premiered at the 2013 Cannes Quinzaine Des Réalisateurs, was short-listed for the 88th Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature, and gained worldwide acclaim.
Producer Benjamin de Menil is the founder of Academia de Bachata, a free music school that is at the heart of this tale. The Academia, the only one of its kind, champions a traditional musical that has long been disparaged as an expression of the backwardness of Dominican slums. Through his long-standing relationships with the students and bachata musicians, the film crew has had unique access to their stories.
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In addition to running the Academia, Benjamin has also produced recordings and tours of traditional Dominican musical artists for 25 years under the label iASO Records.
Producer Laura Amelia Guzmán produces films and documentaries by Latin American directors. She co-founded the production company Aurora Dominicana with her husband Israel Cárdenas as a platform for Dominican films that are honest and refreshing in form and content. Their film Sand Dollars (2014) was selected as the Dominican entry to the 88th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
Co-Producer Mónica de Moya has been working with Aurora Dominicana since 2014. She is experienced in the full life cycle of film production from development to distribution. Among her recent film credits are: Carmencita, directed by Nayibe Abel; Noeli in the Countries, a feature-length documentary directed by Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas; and Mirian Miente, a film by Oriol Estrada and Natalia Cabral.
Executive Producer Donald Rosenfeld has produced award-winning, critically acclaimed motion pictures for the past three decades. He served as the President of Merchant Ivory Productions from 1987 through 1998, making Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, Howards End, The Remains of the Day, and other noteworthy projects. Recent films include Tree of Life (Winner of the Palme D’Or) and Voyage of Time, both written & directed by Terrence Malick; Effie Gray, written by Emma Thompson; and Jodorowsky’s Dune.
Fabián Caballero is a documentary film editor based in New York City. From 2013 to 2017, he worked with Capital K Pictures on two feature documentary films, Gaucho del Norte and The Interpreters, In the past year, Fabián was an editor on Barbara Kopple’s latest project, Desert One, a film about the U.S.’s failed mission to rescue the American hostages held at the U.S. Embassy in Iran. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 2019.
Director of Photography Nicolás Ordóñez Carrillo is a Colombian filmmaker who has produced, photographed and written films that have premiered at Rotterdam, Toronto and Cannes. He recently shot and directed the documentary feature The Woman of the 7 Names, and is finalizing his new film, Time Window, filmed in Antarctica aboard a US warship and also from a NASA plane. He is a professor, Director of Communications, and former Creative Director of Escuela Internacional de Cine, San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, where he taught the Seminar “How to Tell a Story” with the Nobel Prize Laureate Gabriel García Márquez.
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Advisor Dr. Deborah Pacini Hernandez (Ph.D., Cornell University) is the world’s top scholar on bachata. In the 1980s and 1990s Dr. Pacini took extensive footage of the Dominican bachata scene, and has made this archive available for the first time for use in this film. Author of the first book published on Dominican bachata, her research has employed Latin American music as a lens for examining class, ethnicity, gender and generation.