Profiles: Mirlanda Torres | Proimágenes Colombia

Colombian producer of Manos Sucias, a film with executive production by Spike Lee, released in October.
 
Mirlanda Torres Zapata has served as production manager for a large number of recent films in Colombian cinema; now, with her company El Colectivo Grupo Creativo, she is working on the production of several film projects. On October 9, the Colombian-American co-production Manos Sucias premiered, directed by Josef Kubota Wladyka and executive produced by Spike Lee.
 
Mirlanda was born in Medellin on May 31, 1979. For high school, she studied at the Javiera Londoño Secondary School in her home city. She graduated with a degree Social Communication and Journalism from the Pontificia Bolivariana University in Medellin, Colombia; in October 2003, she arrived at the International School of Film and Television in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, where she completed the advanced specialization course “From Field Production to Executive Production in the International Market."
 
Torres entered television in the general production department of ​​the local TV station Telemedellin in 2001, where she completed her university internship with work at several of the station’s programs. In 2004, she worked in production of commercials and handled an array of projects with the pre-production company Basepre, including Aguila Light Pesca, Don Julio en El Ley, Madrúguele a Diciembre, and Pepsi. In television, she directed the production of the Colombian-Spanish series Karabudjan, filmed one hundred per cent in real spaces, with the company Notro Televisión for Antena 3 of Spain. She also managed the production of the series Bazurto (Made in Cartagena), created by CMO Productions for Canal Caracol.
 
In the world of film, she began her production work with movies like Rosario Tijeras, a Colombian-Mexican co-production directed by Emilio Maillé, and Los Actores del Conflicto (The Actors in the Conflict) by Lisandro Duque (2004). A year later, she played a part in building the film department at Patofeofilms, where she was responsible for the management of audiovisual projects. She worked there on the development of the feature films Blood and Rain by Jorge Navas (2009) and Carlos Moreno’s Dog Eat Dog (2008), for which she also led the field production, as well as the development of the short films by Juan Manuel Acuña El Último Golpe del Caballero and Los Ciclos.
 
In 2007, she was Chief of Development for the animated feature film La Leyenda Makú, directed by Felipe Dothée and produced by Cigoto Producciones, and produced the documentary From the Land to your Table by Carolina Navas, a co-production with Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Galicia (Spain). That same year, she complemented her production activities by teaching the Film Production workshop at the Politécnico Gran Colombiano University in Bogota and the Documentary Production section of the Diploma in Documentary-Making at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.
 
In 2008 Torres joined the Dynamo group, where she served as Production Manager for several Colombian and international projects. In this role, she headed the production of the feature film Nochebuena by Camila Loboguerrero; acted as production coordinator for Sebastián Cordero’s Rage (Colombia, Spain); led the production for Colombia of the co-production Undertow (Peru, Colombia, Germany, France) by Javier Fuentes-León, shot in Cabo Blanco, Peru; and worked on the post-production and promotion of Rage and Undertow. With Dynamo, she also managed the production of the Colombian-Spanish film With or Without Love by David Serrano (2011) and headed up the production of Roa by Andi Baiz (2013), Que viva la música by Carlos Moreno (2015), the Colombian-Peruvian feature film The Vanished Elephant by Javier Fuentes-León (2015), La Rectora (2015), and Maranon (2015).
 
She also directed the production of The Snitch Cartel by Carlos Moreno (2012) with 11:11 Films; she led the production as well of the Colombian-Spanish co-production Blind Alley (2011), and the feature film Alias ​​María by Jose Luis Rugeles, produced by Rhayuela Cine.
 
Since 2011, she has made time for work on the side with her company El Colectivo. This has included her co-production, together with the Peruvian company El Directorio, of the feature film El Abuelo by Gustavo Saavedra, shot in the second half of 2014 and winner of the Dicine Award in Peru. She developed the Colombian feature films El Endiablado (The Devil) and Lindavista F.C, written by Gustavo Galeano and Juan David Melo, which won the Feature Film Script Writing Award given by the Medellin city government as part of its Creation Grants. In January 2012, she signed a co-production agreement with the United States for Josef Kubota Wladyka’s feature film Manos Sucias, released in Colombia in October 2014.
 
Her forays into short film have included her executive production of Pablo González’s Esto es un Revolver, which won her the Short Film incentive from the Film Development Fund (FDC), and Asunto de Gallos by Joan Gómez, winner of the Short Film Prize awarded by the Bogota Cinemateca Distrital. Both shorts have taken part in and received numerous awards at festivals worldwide.
 
She is currently working on the pre-production of the Spanish feature film Palmeras en la Nieve.