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The Colombian-Canadian director Lina Rodriguez will participate in the 1^st Autobiographical Film Festival: Toronto in First Person. This is a space for meeting, creating and researching, focused on documentary works based on autobiographical writing and memory exploration, family relationships, search for individual identity and investigation of family stories.

The program comprises more than twenty “in-first-person” films from Canadian filmmakers. Among these, the films by Lina Rodriguez stand out, as they possess the poetic and intimate spirit, close to experimental cinema and, above all, related to the Toronto’s community, artistic and cultural scene committed to independence and freedom of their productions and directors.

With the gaze of a person who has settled in but is still passing through; with the nostalgia of a foreigner from another territory, Lina Rodriguez stares, established in Canada, family tensions and relationships that connect her to Colombia and her own history. This sensitivity makes her one of the Latin America’s most particular contemporary filmmakers. She inaugurates bodies and landscapes through her filming, stares at emptiness, absence, sounds and emotions. It is precisely that feeling, present in her two films selected for the Festival, of a person who returns to a space that no longer belongs to her, that represents, in turn, the author, approaching, digging in her history and memory; a phenomenon she has known how to portray, becoming the foundation of her work and giving her a place in this 1^st Autobiographical Film Festival: Toronto in first person.

One of the essential purposes of this autobiographical film festival is creating a Canadian first-person cinema genealogy, permeated by other cultural variances, from the 70’s to this day.

The MOCA is the first virtual museum focused on autobiographical, self-referential and first-person cinema in the Hispanic scenario and was born from the collaboration between La Cinematográfica, organization devoted to cultural management regarding cinema, and the company Cafés Candelas, which continues to bet on the promotion of creation and audiovisual arts. The exhibition focused on Lina Rodriguez will take place from June 1 to 13, 2020, available in virtual format and entirely for free through the museomoca.com platform, where people will be able to enjoy the short films Aquí y allá (2019) and Self-portrait No. 1 (2019), this latter being qualified as a poetic portray of identity, belonging and home, and which participated in the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.

In the first days of 2020, Rodriguez was chosen by Michèle Maheux, winner of the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award, as the recipient of CAD $50,000 in postproduction services by Technicolor during the award ceremony of the Toronto Critics Association.

“Michèle’s passion and commitment have been an inspiration for countless women to keep believing in ourselves and keep marking our own paths. I am immensely grateful to Michèle for choosing me. Currently, I am developing the preproduction of So Much Tenderness, my third fiction feature film that tells the story of a Colombian immigrant and her teenage daughter in Toronto. These 50,000 Dollars have a great impact on our budget and will contribute to make this film come true. As an immigrant filmmaker, I am excited about representing on screen the multicultural society we state to be proud of in Canada”, Rodriguez affirmed.
 
It is worth mentioning that the Colombian-Canadian director finished filming in Toronto her most recent documentary tentatively entitled Estas manos. Currently, she is under postproduction process, which will be made in Toronto, and the sound mix, that will be made in Buenos Aires. On the other hand, her most recent short film Aquí y allá, Official Selection of the National Competition in the last BOGOSHORTS edition, participated in FICUNAM and in the "First Look" Festival at the Museum for the Moving Image in New York.

Last January, Lina Rodriguez participated, with her short film Ante mis ojos, in a program on short films by Colombian women (Laura Huertas Millan, Gloria Isabel Gomez, Sara Nanclares), within the framework of the selection made by the Medellin Museum of Modern Arts of the best films that marked 2019. On the other hand, Mañana a esta hora was included in the itinerant BIFF program in 2020.