Fernando Frias is a Mexican documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and award-winning director.
He wrote, directed and produced his latest feature, I’M NO LONGER HERE, which was selected for the Sundance Screenwriters lab and won over 10 prestigious development, production and post-production grants. The film has gone on to win the feature film competition and audience prizes at the Morelia Film Festival in 2019 and best film at the Cairo International Film Festival. It has also garnered 10 Mexican Academy Premios Arieles, including Best Director, Best Picture and Best Script. It has been nominated at the Goya Awards and chosen to represent Mexico at the Oscars in 2021.
Frias is an alumnus of Columbia University where he received his MFA in directing and screenwriting as a Fulbright Scholar.
I’m No Longer Here
Mexico's Oscar-Winning Directors Embrace Rise Of Fernando Frías
Mexican film directors have enjoyed success at the Academy Awards in recent years. Alfonso Cuarón won an Oscar for directing Gravity in 2014, and for Roma in 2019. Alejandro González Iñárritu won one in 2015 for directing Birdman and the following year for The Revenant. And Guillermo del Toro won his Oscar for directing The Shape of Water in 2018. Now, the "Tres Amigos," as they're known, may welcome uno más: up-and-coming filmmaker Fernando Frías de la Parra. His film I'm No Longer Here is Mexico's Academy Award entry for Best International Feature Film.
The film, also titled Ya No Estoy Aqui, is set in 2010, during a real, but very brief, cultural phenomenon that happened in Monterrey, Mexico. That's when teens in the industrial city's impoverished barrios would hang out in the streets wearing baggy clothes, singing and dancing to nostalgic cumbia music from Colombia.
"I think is one of the most memorable debuts on film and Mexican film in the last couple of decades," Guillermo del Toro said in a video conversation recorded last year. "It's a very painful and beautiful movie at the same time. It presents you with the usual melodramatic choices and discards them."
"Yeah, it challenges all your expectations," Alfonso Cuarón agreed.
Del Toro praised Frías for portraying a culture that no longer exists and the experiences of a young man in exile trying to protect his identity. "I think that is rare," he added, "a movie that you find being done so early in the career of a young filmmaker that has the wisdom and the complete control of the medium. He inherits a mantle that you can trace back to the golden era of Mexican cinema."
"Fernando for me, is already an inspiration," said Cuarón. "He's truly original."
Del Toro and Cuarón are rooting for Fernando Frías to join them as Oscar winners.
Created by Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen, Los Espookys follows a group of friends who turn their love for horror into a peculiar business, providing horror to those who need it, in a dreamy Latin American country where the strange and eerie are just part of daily life.
Los Espookys is executive produced by Lorne Michaels and Fred Armisen, along with Broadway Video’s Andrew Singer and Alice Mathias. The series is co-executive produced by Ana Fabrega, Julio Torres and Nate Young.
Indiwire:
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Vanity Fair:
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