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Director Biography - Gianfranco Fernández-Ruiz
Gianfranco Fernández-Ruiz is an award winning writer and director. His coming of age short film JEROME, qualified for the 96th Academy Awards, was a finalist for the HBO Short Film Award, and won Best Boston Film at the Boston Short Film Festival. His film SABORRRR! was nominated by NewFilmmakers LA as Best Short Film Comedy for their 12th Annual Awards, and won Best Director at the 2024 Zepstone International Film Festival Awards. More recently, his work was selected by the Latino Film Institute for the 2024 Inclusion Fellowship for the short film GRANADA. He is a 2023 Quarterfinalist of the Nicholl Fellowship for his feature Summer of Mercedes. Gianfranco holds an MFA from the AFI Conservatory in Directing. His thesis film and most personal film yet, WHEN BIG PEOPLE LIE premieres at AFI Fest 2024 and was recently placed as a finalist for Shore Scripts Short Film fund 2023, it’s available now on Coverfly’s The Red List. . His shorts have played at over 50 film festivals globally, and placed at a dozen more including the Urbanworld, Austin Film Festival, American Black Film Festival, Screencraft, NALIP, and the Commercial Diversity Directing Program. His film DEAD FLESH, especially created for the Louisiana Film Prize, won both the Top Five and Founder’s Circle Awards. More recently, Gianfranco was awarded a grant by the Interledger Foundation for his proof of concept Sci-fi short film, ANEMOIA, OR SCENES FROM THE FUTURE and is currently in post-production. Gianfranco marks culture as integral to a character’s identity, but second always to a character’s story.
Director Statement
As a spirited, too-much-to-handle kid, my mom would threaten me with, “you want me to call your father?” You ever flinch at a word? I did. Whatever a father was, it frightened me - my monster under the bed.
As a teenager, the idea of an ever-present father still terrified me. A man of my own blood around all the time? What would that look like? How would it change the world I knew? How could that influence me as a man and future father?
I'd never know.
So much of who I believed I was felt like a great mystery wrapped up in this man. I didn't know where he was, or what family I had. The history, the legacy, the facts: my father came to America undocumented, participated in illegal activities, imprisoned for ten years then deported. And for years I thought, what of that belongs to me? I sat with my hands behind my back waiting for that question to be answered, waiting for the moment I'd be taken in. But that whole time, my mother worked 80 hour weeks; took me to school; put me into programs; and checked in throughout the day. Frankly, for a single mother I didn't know where she found the time, but as I grow older I realize she didn't find the time. She made the time.
The school to prison pipeline is a darkness that threatens communities of color everywhere. But families and communities that stick together shed light on that darkness. Those programs gave me community, and my mother, in so many ways, played the role of a father too.
My mother. A strong, independent, bull-willed woman taxed with teaching her son to articulate his grief, and more importantly, to stay a child, to keep his imagination, even if she didn't know exactly how. She wasn't always the softest. She didn't always understand why I wanted to know a man that was never there. But she showed up, and taught me that showing up is the single most important thing a person can do in life.
Later I'd learn I'd be a father. I was 24. I learned that being a father was as simple as showing up. Unfortunately, I don't see the single mother represented on screen. This film is for all the single mothers like my mother who mentored me into my fatherhood with little to nothing.