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Cady Abarca
A 2005 National Board of Review Student Grant was an affirmation that Cady Abarca was a filmmaker. But making movies was not always his first option. While growing up in Peru, Cady’s parents pressured him to become an engineer like his father, with the prospect of a steady job and a steady income--they considered artists unreliable, with a dim economic future. So they sent Cady, at the age of 16, to engineering school. Unhappy at the prospect of industrial engineering, Cady realized his dream of filmmaking one fateful night when he attended a screening of We All Loved Each Other So Much: “Wow! This is what filmmaking is supposed to be. A couple of months later I saw Luna by Bertolucci, and I knew this was what I had to do with my life."
Upon graduating with a degree in industrial engineering, he gave his medal to his mom and his diploma to his dad; two weeks later he was producing a music video. He continued to write, direct, and produce more than a dozen 35mm feature and short films in Peru. He later received a special scholarship to study at the Robles Godoy Film School of Lima.
In 1989 he moved to New York and wrote, produced, and directed Danny, a 35mm, 18-minute film shot in Lima. The film was honored by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and showcased at several festivals, including Cannes, Montreal, Berlin, Oberhaussen, London, and Montecatini. Danny also received the Director’s Choice Award at the Black Maria Film Festival in New York; his film was later purchased by Canal+ in France. Cady wrote, directed, and produced another film‚ Lima: The New Face‚ a feature-length documentary addressing the problems of immigration and prejudice suffered by the indigenous people of Peru, was honored by the NYSCA and the United Nations Arts Fund.
Cady has also worked as a freelance producer and writer for Jornada Extra, a weekly prime- time news program broadcast in the Dominican Republic. Through this collaboration, he produced 100% Dominicano, a series of three documentaries about the Dominican community in New York City, which was sold to Planete TV-France for broadcast in Europe and Africa.
In 2000, Cady attended Columbia University’s prestigious Masters of Fine Arts program for film directing, intensifying his study of the art of filmmaking. In 2005, he completed his thesis film, El Viaje (One-Day Trip), a 35mm, 17-minute film, and was awarded a student grant from the National Board of Review. “I am very fond of the NBR. It was the first award I won for One-Day Trip and it was a manifestation of all my hard work.” In 2006, Cady's film was a Student Academy Award Silver Medalist winner, a Faculty Select at the Columbia University Film Festival, received a 2005 post-production grant from NYSCA, and participated at festivals in Tampere, Seoul, and Lima. In addition, the film recently won the Cervantes Award at the São Paulo International Film Festival and the jury selection at the Los Angeles International Short Festival.
Currently, Cady is in the early stages of developing two feature-length screenplays: Paper Clouds©, selected for the Manheim Film Market and for the Produire Au Sud, sponsored by France; and Broken Rhymes, a finalist at the 2002 and 2003 Sundance Writers Lab and among the top three finalists for the NALIP 2002-ABC Fellowship and the IFP 2003 & 2004 Project Involve N.Y. Since 2004, Cady has taught directing, producing, editing, and writing at the Katharine Gibbs School.
As for his parents, it is still tough for them to consider him a filmmaker: "My father always refers to me as an engineer. I’ll tell him that I am writing a screenplay about a cowboy and he’ll say, 'Oh, that’s great! The producer will be really impressed because you are an engineer and that is going to help you.’ They are very proud of me, but the filmmaker word is still too difficult for them.”
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