Filmmakers and Producers

Paula Heredia

Paula Heredia is a Salvadoran director and editor from Suchitoto, El Salvador, who has been making documentary films for over 20 years. She has won numerous awards, including the Eddie Award® for editing Unzipped (1995) and an Emmy® for HBO’s In Memoriam, NYC 9/11/01 (2002). For her film Africa Rising (2009), she received Best Woman Director at the Soria International Film Festival in Spain.


Her work includes the Animal Planet documentary “Toucan Nation” (2016), The Alzheimer’s Project (2009), and “The Couple in the Cage” (1993), which was acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art of New York MOMA).

Paula is a fervent promoter of the regional film industry in Central America. Since 1996, through the program "Digital Cinema" of Casa Clementina, a non-profit arts and education organization, she has influenced and provided technical, aesthetic, and executive development training to emerging filmmakers from El Salvador and Central America.

She is the co-founder of a Latin American-focused International Film Festival in Suchitoto, FICS. Now in its tenth edition, it is an innovative cultural and tourism offering that generates economic development, activates the participation of youth, and mobilizes the media in support of cultural projects that transform the image of the country internationally.

AVAILABLE FROM TWN

The Couple in the Cage
Coco Fusco & Paula Heredia
1993, 30 min., Color, US
Over the last five hundred years, non-western human beings have been exhibited in the taverns, theaters, gardens, museums, zoos, circuses and world's fairs of Europe, and the circuses and freak shows of the United States. In commemoration of this practice, video maker Coco Fusco and performance arti...

Imelda Is Not Alone
Paula Heredia
2023, 31 min., Color, US/El Salvador
Imelda Cortez, aged 19, arrives at the hospital bleeding after giving birth in a latrine. She is handcuffed to the hospital bed, arrested on suspicion of abortion, and later charged with attempted and aggravated murder.

Imelda's only hope at freedom is a local citizen’s movement that d...


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