Filmmaker based in Mexico City and Bogotá, producing across Latin America.
About
Monica Wise Robles is a Colombian American documentary filmmaker and DP based in Mexico City. She has produced documentaries with the Guardian, the NYT and the BBC, among other outlets. Her first short documentary Lupita premiered at the Ambulante festival in Mexico, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Doc NYC in 2020, receiving awards from several others. She was a cinematographer on Netflix’s Trials of Gabriel Fernández (2018), Iliana Sosa’s feature What We Leave Behind (2022 SXSW award winner, NYT Critic Pick, and Gotham Awards Nominee for Best Documentary feature), After the Flood (Vice, 2022 Emmy Winner), Niñas / Somos El Fuego (2022 Premio Gabo Winner). She is also the DP of Vena Aquatica, a documentary in production about ecofeminists in El Salvador. Monica is an IWMF fellow, a Ford Foundation and Sundance Institute grantee, and a UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program Associate. Her clients have included UNESCO, the UNEP, The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, Soil Haiti, the Whitney Museum, the World Health Organization and Spotify, among others. Over the last decade, Monica has produced from Mexico, HaitĂ, Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. She studied liberal arts in New York, medicinal plants and socialism in Cuba, holistic medicine in Chilean communities, and journalism at a school in Mexico before #metoo blew it apart. She has faith in old stories and believes we owe indigenous peoples almost everything. She is currently lensing Vena Acuática, a feature documentary in production in El Salvador, directed by Amada Torruella, which just received Chicken & Egg for 2024, and The School of Hope, directed by Amy MartĂnez, and co-producing and DP’ing Forajida: la mujer de las bestias heridas. www.monicawiserobles.com
