Profiles: Juanita Onzaga | Proimágenes Colombia

Juanita Onzaga was born in 1991 in the city of Bogota. She is a filmmaker based in Brussels. Her productions have been selected at international festivals such as the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival - IDFA and Dok Leipzig, among others, as well as in the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes. She was a jury member in the Labo Competition of the 43rd edition of the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival.
 
Her studies include photography direction and a master's degree in film at the Sint-Lukas school in Brussels. In her work, she combines fiction and non-fiction elements in a hybrid way, in her narrations she covers subjects such as memory, death and imagination, this is how she creates stories that reflect different ways of perceiving reality in the middle of the Colombian political context, creating own universes between dreams, jungles, and cities where her characters are surrounded by spirits, placing the mystical inside realism, where the invisible worlds complement and give new answers and meanings to the tangible world.
 
She began with her first short film La jungla te conoce mejor que tú mismo (2017) with which she won the Jury Prize for Best Short Film in its premiere at the Berlinale in 2017 in the Generation section, and other awards in more than 50 festivals in those who participated such as San Sebastian, Busan, FICCI, among others. Her short film Nuestro canto a la guerra (2018) had its premiere at the Cannes Directors' Fortnight in 2018 and was selected in more than 80 international festivals such as Clermont Ferrand, IDFA, DokLeipzig, among others, and won awards such as Santa Lucia a Best Documentary, Best Poster, Best Original Music at the 16th Bogota Short Film Festival - Bogoshorts in 2018.
 
She is currently in the process of writing his debut feature Las tierras que te buscan, which received the stimulus for the development of the Hubert Bals Bright Future Fund, as well as in the pre-production of a virtual reality experience and filming a documentary-fiction feature film.