Officially, Diana Cadavid is Director of Industry Programs for the Latino Film Institute. Unofficially, I’ve crowned this Latina as one of the few guardians of the Latin film galaxy.
Born in Colombia, Cadavid always had a love of literature, photography, and film. At the age of 24, she left Colombia and made her home in Canada. “I actually started volunteering for a film festival in Toronto,” Cadavid tells Latina Media Co in our one-on-one interview. “I worked for TIFF for many years as the assistant to the programmer, then in Panama, and then Miami, and a number of different film festivals,” she says.
Twenty years after starting her work in Canada, Cadavid would find herself as a programmer stateside for the Latino Film Institute. Her first big task was to program the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF). “In my first year working with LALIFF, I came to just select the films that were going to be part of that year’s festival,” says Cadavid.
Then COVID hit.
“Two days after everything shut down, I woke up in the middle of the night, and I was like, ‘I need to think of something, because I don’t want this job to go away!’ So I proposed doing the festival virtual.” Diana Cadavid helped to pioneer one of the first virtual experiences at the time. For LALIFF, she organized an at-home viewing experience, complete with specific time slots, online parties, and even Q&A’s three times a week for an entire month. Not surprisingly, “People responded fantastically!”
As a shepherd for Latin films in both Latin America and here in the States, Cadavid is proud of her work, and rightfully so. But, it is her love for festivals that brings up her level of reverence and passion. “[Film festivals] bring films to audiences, but at the same time, they create spaces for industry people to connect and to be able to make more films.” Cadavid takes great pride in not only curating the perfect, programming mix but also creating an environment where artists can collaborate. “Film festivals are these wonderful ecosystems that keep independent cinema flowing and getting to people, connecting with different types of audiences with different types of interests. I am very enthralled by that!” she enthuses.
And trust us, she is vigilant for the medium all year long. In addition to her work at LALIFF, she’s also an international programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, ensuring that she’s serving and building community regardless of the season.
For LALIFF, which is under the Latino Film Institute (LFI) umbrella, Cadavid takes great care to follow the LFI mission – to showcase, strengthen, and celebrate the richness of the Latino perspective by providing a pipeline, platform, and launching pad for our community. She programs nearly 100 films for the summer festival – “I don’t shy away from bringing films that open difficult conversations or add to difficult conversations, or films that bring their own political statements,” says Cadavid. “For example, Uvalde Mom. In this day and age, it’s a highly political documentary. [Anayansi Prado – director of the film] is giving voice to a woman who has been put through very difficult situations by law enforcement, and then with everything that happened in Uvalde, that was a film that was denouncing something really heavy.”
Cadavid continues, “What I think is important when making those decisions is making sure that we’re programming the films because of the right reasons. You know, we are a platform for discussion and for conversation to happen. We have the responsibility to open that platform, but we are also not here to tell people what to think or how to think or how to respond.”
In the two decades Cadavid has been programming, she sees so much growth and evolution in the medium. Lately, she’s been seeing new and independent voices in the U.S. with underrepresented filmmakers creating their work outside the Hollywood system.
Outside of the States, she’s seen more projects that are authentically and entirely from the LATAM with multiple countries partnering to finance a project. “When that happens, you immediately can sense the growth in the sizes of the films, the complexity of the stories. There’s something in that exchange that is very enriching and very powerful.”
I’d argue Diana Cadavid herself is enriching and powerful. Just as a guardian of the medium should be.
