September 2011
 Pedro
Daniel López (Tzotzil)is a founder of the indigenous media center Sna'ik/The House of the Wind, and has coordinated projects at Proyecto de Videastas Indígenas de la Frontera Sur, both located in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. He has participated in the workshop Cineminutos, led by the celebrated director Juan Carlos Rulfo, in Villahermosa, Tabasco, and Mérida, Yucatan. López has also taken production and screenwriting courses in documentary filmmaking at the International School of Television and Cinema of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba. He received a certificate in visual anthropology from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) in San Cristóbal de las Casas. His award-winning short films have been screened in festivals in Canada, Chile, Mexico and the United States. K’in Santo Ta Sotz’leb/Day of the Dead in the Land of the Bats, won Best Documentary and the audience award at the 2003 Regional Festival Geografías Suaves in Mérida, Yucatan. In 2004 he obtained a grant from the state arts and culture fund Fondo Estatal para la Cultura y las Artes (FONCA), in Chiapas, México, through which he produced K’evujel ta Jteklum/Song of our Land.
In 2006 Lopez received a Rockefeller Foundation-funded Media Arts Fellowship, giving him the opportunity to produce his first feature documentary, La Pequeña Semilla en el Asfalto/The Little Seed in the Asphalt, about rural indigenous youth seeking educational opportunities in urban San Cristóbal. Co-produced with the collective Mundos Inéditos, the film was shot in high definition and transferred to 35mm with the support of the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía-IMCINE, Mexico’s national film institute. It premiered at the 2010 Morelia International Film Festival and received an honorable mention at the 25th International Guadalajara Film Festival. López is currently at work with Mundos Inéditos, a film, media, and arts training center based in San Cristóbal de Las Casas that serves indigenous communities of Chiapas. López was born in Zinacantán, Chiapas, is a fluent speaker of Tzotzil.
"To raise the voice of our communities has been a challenge.
I believe that a strong need exists for us, the indigenous, to
express ourselves and represent ourselves through audiovisual
media, and to work towards our own self-created indigenous communication
projects. I want to transform living things into art: to say that
here we are indigenous, we exist, we have dreams and goals. I
hope that the trip that began in Zinacantán will last many
years; each day takes me farther in the discovery of new horizons."
Screened by NMAI
Image credit:
Pedro Daniel López - photograph by Amalia Cordova; Pedro Daniel López - photograph by Cecilia Monroy Cuevas
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