Location United States (US)
The Low Season is a hybrid documentary-fiction film. Inspired by films from the mid 1980s such as John Sayles’ Brother From Another Planet (1984) and Eliseo Subiela’s Man Facing Southeast (1987), The Low Season takes place along Roosevelt Avenue, a corridor in Queens, which has been demonized and romanticized by outsiders, but which has a life of its own.
The story centers around Rafa, a woman who possesses an uncanny ability to soothe people by listening to their stories. While the character of Rafa is largely scripted, her conversations with a variety of participants who either live or work on Roosevelt Avenue will be unscripted and closer to “documentary” in nature. Our production team is seeking to raise $15,500 in order to do two key things to kickstart a full feature:
Bernardo Ruiz (Writer, Director, Producer) is Mexican-American writer and filmmaker based in Queens, NY. He was born in Guanajuato, Mexico to Mexican and American parents and came to the U.S. at age 6. During the handycam craze of the 1980s, he made Super8mm films. Ruiz later studied photography with Joel Sternfeld at Sarah Lawrence College and writing with the novelist Jerome Badanes. For two and a half decades he has worked in documentary, directing five feature documentaries and garnering three News & Documentary Emmy® nominations. The Low Season is his first hybrid fiction-documentary feature.
Fernando Rocha (Director of Photography) is a Mexican-American Cinematographer based out of Queens, NY, whose work spans both scripted and unscripted genres. He is a 2023 PBS Ignite X Creative Voices Fellow, a 2022 Sundance X AdobeIgnite Fellow, a 2022 Southern Exposure Film Fellow and a 2021 Fulbright Scholar.Fernando’s visual approach merges the organic and intimate nature of documentary filmmaking with the attention to detail of the narrative field in order to create a visual language that is right for each story. He graduated fromAmerican University in Washington, D.C. and was a member of the school’s Frederick Douglass Distinguished Scholars program. He also supplemented his studies at the University of Southern California School of CinematicArts as well as the FAMU Conservatory in Prague. In addition to his work as a Cinematographer, Fernando spent over 12 years performing Mexican Folkloric dance throughout the DMV region.
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