El Mundo Que Nos Rodea (The Surrounding World)

Wendy P. Espinal

Dominican producer and documentary filmmaker based between Santo Domingo and Madrid, Spain. Her work as a filmmaker is built on research, process and meaning. She has worked in multiple cultural and film projects, actively participating in their production, including feature films like “Holy Beasts” (L.A. Guzmán & I. Cárdenas, 2019), “Cocote” (N.C. de los Santos – Locarno Film Festival Signs of Life Best Feature Film 2017), “Petra” (J. Rosales, 2018), “El Rey de la Habana” (A. Villaronga, 2015), “El Cosmonauta” (N. Alcalá, 2013).

With the short films “The Harvest”, “Food”, “Mujeres Tierra” and “The Surrounding World” (to be premiered at Havana International Film Festival 2019), her work as a director has been supported by Programa Ibermedia, Fonprocine Dominican Republic, Berlinale Talents Guadalajara, Iberdoc, UN Women, MiradasDoc, Directed by Women Spain, and other international organizations and film festivals. She graduated from UNAPEC’s School of Arts and Communications, the National Theatre School of Santo Domingo, and has a MFA from Université Sorbonne Paris 1 / Universidade de Évora / Universitá degli Studi di Padova as part of an Erasmus Mundus Master Program. She’s also trained in international workshops with Susana Barriga, María José Díez, Marcos Pimentel, Pedro Loeb, Belkis Vega, Eduardo Milewicz, Bob McAndrew, Hernán Musaluppi, Lucrecia Martel, Tanya Valette, Eliseo Altunaga, among other renowned filmmakers. Together with associate producer Carla Jovine (Candela, El Rey de la Habana, María Montéz, Los Fabulosos), she started the 1981 Cinema Collective, an independent film production company based in Santo Domingo, which aims to develop and produce narrative and documentary films with an important cultural quest and artistic sense to rethink Caribbean film languages, while building coproduction bridges throughout the iberoamerican region.