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Secuestro is an action film about three rookie kidnappers who scramble as their ill-fated plan falls apart. About the terrible wages of violence and crime.
Filmed in four days on location in the mountainous central region of the Dominican Republic as the NYU film school masters thesis of Dominican-American filmmaker Juan Castillo.
NYU Graduate Film Program awards: Screenwriting, Production, Ensemble Cast, Cinematography, Editing, Directing – the only foreign language NYU graduate thesis film to garner all key category awards.
Genre: Action-Suspense-Thriller
Duration: 30 minutes
Color: color
Format: 35mm
Locations: Dominican Republic
The New York University Tisch School of the Arts is the performing, cinematic and media arts school of New York University.
Karyn Kiyoko Kusama is an American filmmaker. She made her film debut with the sports drama film Girlfight (2000), for which she won Best Director at the Sundance Film Festival and earned a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature.
The Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo (UASD) is the public university system in the Dominican Republic with its flagship campus in the Ciudad Universitaria neighborhood of Santo Domingo and with regional campuses in many cities of the Republic. It was founded by Jose Gabriel Garcia and Emiliano Tejera in 1866 as the Professional Institute, replacing the former Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, one of the first universities of the Western Hemisphere (Americas), which was founded unofficially by a Papal bull in 1538, officially by royal decree in 1558, and closed in 1822. It was later renamed University of Santo Domingo in 1914.
The AFI Conservatory is a private not-for-profit graduate film school in the Hollywood Hills district of Los Angeles. Students learn from the masters in a collaborative, hands-on production environment with an emphasis on storytelling. The Conservatory is a program of the American Film Institute founded in 1969.
Eva Aridjis is a Mexican and American filmmaker. She attended the American School Foundation in Mexico City, Princeton University, and New York University. She has made many prize-winning short and feature-length films.
Frank Ewen Flowers Jr. is a Caymanian independent filmmaker, film director and screenwriter, writer and director of the award-winning 2003 short film Swallow and the 2004 feature motion picture Haven, the latter photographed on the island of Grand Cayman. Flowers is a graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.
The Price of Sugar is a 2007 Uncommon Productions film directed by Bill Haney and produced by Haney and Eric Grunebaum about exploitation of Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic involved with production of sugar, and the efforts of Spanish priest Father Christopher Hartley to ameliorate their situation. It is narrated by actor Paul Newman. The documentary shows the poor working conditions in the sugar cane plantations, and political control exerted by the Vicini family to stifle efforts to change the situation.
Cristina Kotz Cornejo is an Argentine-American director and screenwriter who divides her time between Boston, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires. She is a descendant of the Huarpe people of the Cuyo region of Argentina and was educated in the US and Argentina.
Michael Paxton is an American filmmaker and writer. He has directed, produced, and written several films, both live action and animated, as well as plays and books. His feature documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature and a Golden Satellite Award for Best Documentary film in 1997. Paxton currently works as Multimedia Producer for the Ayn Rand Institute.
Luke Matheny is an American actor, writer, and director. Matheny is an Academy Award winner, receiving the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for God of Love.
Diandrea Rees is an American screenwriter and director. She is known for her feature films Pariah (2011), Bessie (2015), Mudbound (2017), and The Last Thing He Wanted (2020). Rees has also written and directed episodes for television series including Empire, When We Rise, and Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams.
Alex Ross Perry is an American filmmaker and actor.
Alfonso Rodríguez is a Dominican director, producer, writer, actor and aspiring presidential candidate for the 2020 elections in the Dominican Republic.
Jen McGowan is an American filmmaker. At the 2014 South by Southwest Film Festival, McGowan won the Gamechanger Award for Kelly & Cal, her first feature film. McGowan is the creator of filmpowered.com, an international skill-sharing, networking and job resource for professional women in film and television. She is an honorary member of the Alliance of Women Directors.
Chloé Zhao is a Chinese-born filmmaker. She is known primarily for her work on independent films.
Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas are a husband and wife directorial team.
Liu Yulin is a Chinese film director, a graduate with the Master of Fine Arts degree from the Graduate Film program of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. In 2014, her short narrative film Door God, which is about a girl in China awaiting the return of her mother, won her the first international film prize - silver medal under the narrative category at the 41st Student Academy Awards. The same film later won in the category of Best Woman Student Filmmaker at the 20th Annual Directors Guild of America Student Film Awards - East Region. With her NYU thesis film Someone to Talk To, which is adapted from her father Liu Zhenyun's award-winning novel One Sentence Is Ten Thousand Sentences, she made her feature film debut in October 2016 at the New Currents section at the 21st Busan International Film Festival.
Stefon Bristol is an American film director and screenwriter. He co-wrote and directed the Netflix time travel film, See You Yesterday, in 2019. Bristol studied at New York University's Graduate Film program, under mentor Spike Lee, who helped produce his debut feature. Bristol also acted as an assistant to Lee, while Lee was filming BlacKkKlansman. Bristol originally shot See You Yesterday as a short, for his thesis film, before expanding it into a feature film. It took five years to complete the film. Bristol received nominations for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay at the 2020 Independent Spirit Awards. Bristol and Bailey won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay and thanked Lee in their acceptance speech.
Reinaldo Marcus Green is an American director, producer and writer. His films include Monsters and Men (2018), Joe Bell (2020), and King Richard (2021), which was nominated for Best Picture at the 94th Academy Awards.
The Havana Film Festival New York (HFFNY) is a film festival, based in New York City, that screens cinema from across Latin America with a special focus on Cuba and its film industry. It is a project of The American Friends of the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with the mission of building cultural bridges between the United States and Cuba through arts projects.