Filmmaker Geanna Orozco on crafting experimental documentaries

Geanna Orozco, a graduate filmmaker at Georgia State University, strives to make experimental documentaries that explore the intersection of identity and culture. Inspired by French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda, new Latin filmmakers from the 60s, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and Third World cinema, Orozco breaks away from the traditional “talking heads” documentary style to craft stories that present “an alternative way of seeing.”

After attending the Cannes Film Festival study abroad program as an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, Orozco felt the experience demystified the film industry for her, and she found herself wanting to change the lens for her future career. Deeply influenced by her Nicaraguan heritage, Orozco’s first semi-autobiographical short, “Niña AmeriNica,” explores her Latin American identity as a child of immigrants in the United States. She further developed her style in her short “Romantikas,” which follows the lives of three sex workers and touches on the relationship between feminism and capitalism.

Orozco is now currently working on her thesis film at GSU, hoping to uncover some of the lost history and film of Nicaragua. “Romantikas” screened and won for the experimental film section at the Georgia State University Student Film Festival and was accepted to screen at the Atlanta Film Festival in the student block. 

Where do you feel like your journey began as a filmmaker? At what point did you feel drawn to creating documentaries?

I’ve been doing it in my brain ever since I was a kid. One of my earliest memories is—I’m a millennial, I’m an MTV kid—so a lot of my years were spent watching music videos. I would listen to a lot of music and simulate these videos that I would make my cousins and sisters play out but without a recording machine.

But officially in the last two or three years I thought I was just going to write about films which is why I applied to study abroad in Cannes. I think I would have been completely content with that, but mostly out of sort of a fear of actually pursuing it. Filmmaking has always been this sort of mystical thing that not a lot of people have access to. I think I finally got the nerve after the [Cannes film] festival.

Who do you feel has been the biggest inspiration for your work?

I was really inspired by Agnès Varda’s work, one of the early pioneers of the French New Wave. You always hear about Godard and Traffaut, like the men of that movement, but she started off a lot of her work as a photographer, and I started out as a photographer. I originally went to school for [photography] like a decade ago. She got into shooting documentaries, which then turned into fiction films, which then turned into sort of a mash-up of both of those things. A lot of her work was very feminist during the second wave movement and very experimental. It’s not talking heads documentaries at all; it’s very artistic.

A lot of the New Latin Movement filmmakers from the 60s, Thomas Gutierrez, [and] Third World cinema is also something that I am inspired by.

How would you describe your work to someone who has never watched your films?

I am very inquisitive and sort of curious about the decision-making of people’s actions. I don’t like being super direct with what I am trying to say, so a lot of it is more like a feeling I’m trying to express. I’m not very good at expressing myself with words in person, but I think I can express an emotion pretty well with art, with photography, with images. I also rely heavily on sound design and music, which propels my work toward something more felt.

How do you want people to think or feel when they see your work?

It’s a tough question. I feel like I’ve been asked that before and I never know how to answer it. I feel like I’m pretty selfish with my work. It’s very much about me and how I am feeling. But if it translates to other people, then that’s incredible. More than anything, I want to present alternative ways of seeing. 

Could you talk a little bit about your original idea for your semi-autobiographical short? What were your goals as a filmmaker going into this project?

A lot of what we know about other countries is through media, especially films, and our perception of it. When I tell people I’m from Nicaragua, the next question I get is “where is that on the map, geographically?” A lot of people don’t know about it because there are not a lot of examples of it in film, in music, or in any artistic capacity. It had a really burgeoning artistic cultural revolution in the 70s and 80s, and it’s been important for me to unearth a lot of the work that was produced during that time.

The autobiographical piece was me pulling archival footage of what I think people probably associate Nicaragua with a lot, which was in the 80s, in the Reagan administration with the Iran-Contra war. And from wanting to express the experience of growing up Latin American, not really knowing that I wasn’t like everyone else. So [I’m] trying to sort of mesh both of those worlds together. Plus the little girl in the film is my half-sister. She is half-white, and I thought that was sort of an interesting dynamic. 

Niña AmeriNica

How did you explore Latin-American identity that you maybe haven’t seen in other pieces of media?

There’s some aspects of feeling, like the dissonance that you feel as a child—trying so hard to fit in, and then realizing that you don’t fit in. But also the assimilation. I think a lot of my childhood was spent trying to assimilate to American culture, almost to the point where you kind of convince yourself that you are just an American girl. And then as you get older, you see pictures of yourself, or you’re just like around your family, you’re constantly reminded by how much acting is involved—how much performance is involved.

And for your other film, Romantikas, where did this original idea stem from?

I think post-2020, post-lockdown, I feel so many things shifted. I felt there was a resurgence on social media, sort of glorifying sex work, you know, like putting it on this pedestal. And I’m not saying in any way, shape or form, that I didn’t agree with it. I just thought it was an interesting thing that I kept seeing come up. And then I realized that so many of my friends were doing it, and people that you never would have expected. And I think it’s something that a lot of women have thought about at least once in their life.

I originally was just going to write like a screenplay, like a narrative fiction screenplay, where the lives of three different women who also happened to be working in the sex industry sort of intersected, and they were all at different stages in life, different generations. One’s in her 20s, the other ones in her 30s, and one’s in her 40s, because in Romantikas, that’s the age difference between all three women. It’s three completely different generations, and the way they approach sex work and how they feel about it.

So I basically sat down with them, on the record, [and] they knew exactly what I was hoping to do, because I was just going to write the screenplay. But then it turned into something else.

Romantikas

I was watching a lot of Agnes Varda  as an inspiration. I really like the way that she portrays female domesticity, sort of in the 50s and 60s—a lot of women performing domestic chores at home. And she shoots them just sort of like, you just see their hands and like them doing the work. And she shoots the men as, like, you know, wide shots, so you can see their whole presence. They’re like fully formed humans, whereas the women, they’re just kind of used for their parts to keep like home life going.

Could you talk about the specific images you used for the film?

I think because of how those are sort of chores that are typically associated [with] women’s work. I kept thinking about the idea of scrubbing something dirty that doesn’t really ever get clean.

Then with the woodworking— one of my friends is a carpenter, and she presents very masculine and is very intense with her gestures, but also has this super softness, like this very emotional, intense depth to her. And there was something about the sounds of the machines coupled with  the things that she’s talking about— it’s very heavy to me. I wanted to touch on the performance part that we’re putting on in capitalism. 

A lot of artists feel like they return to a theme. Do you find that true about yourself?

Totally, yeah. Performance, being a woman, capitalism to a certain extent, but I feel like that’s everyone. I feel like it’s impossible not to be influenced by the system that you live in.

What advice would you give to someone looking to create films in college? How should they begin?

Just do it. I feel like there’s this misconception that just in order for me to make something, everything needed to be perfect—like the circumstances needed to be perfect, I needed to have the perfect camera, the perfect audio equipment, the perfect actors, the perfect landscape. 

You’re going to have to live with [fear] your whole life, but become friends with it because you will fail. And I know we’re all scared that we’re going to fail, but it’s going to happen, and once you’re okay with that, I feel like the world opens up a little bit more.