I picked up a new gig as a contributor/freelance writer at A.Frame, the official digital magazine of the Academy of Motion Pictures & Sciences.

I currently have two stories on the site: the first is a Q&A with director Aitch Alberto about their debut feature film Aristotle & Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, an adaptation of a successful young adult novel of the same name.

My goal was to approach this with a really gentle, sensitive, empathetic lens, which we don’t often see when it comes to stories about Latinos. I really wanted to make an elevated YA novel that had something universal. It’s so easy to distill it to one aspect of identity, but I really wanted to explore how all the things around identity inform how you exist in the world.

Full story/interview here: https://aframe.oscars.org/news/post/aristotle-and-dante-director-aitch-alberto-interview

My other story is also a Q&A, but with director Alejandra Márquez Abella and astronaut José Hernández about the biographical film of Hernández’ life, A Million Miles Away.

I wanted to focus on the community being pivotal to the fulfilling of any endeavor. That was one of the things that mattered the most to me, because I think that’s a very Hispanic, Latino trait. We are used to working in communal efforts and, to me, this was a big part of Jose’s story — not only his family supporting him but also his partner. So, that was a very important thing. Success is not a thing that an individual can achieve by himself or herself. I think you need the whole bunch to be to be enabled to do whatever… The challenge was to fit a 50-year story into a two-hour film.

Full story/interview here: https://aframe.oscars.org/news/post/a-million-miles-away-alejandra-marquez-jose-hernandez-interview