Diana Peralta ’11, who majored in film and media studies, is a Dominican American writer, director, creative producer, and adjunct assistant professor of film at Columbia University.
She is a 2024 Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Labs fellow. Her debut feature film, De Lo Mio, had its world premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinemaFest in 2019, and Filmmaker magazine named her one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” that same year. Her film was initially distributed by HBO and is now available for streaming on the Criterion Channel. She’s working on a second feature.
What does it take to be a good filmmaker?
There’s no one path to get there. If you have the drive to get a story down and bring it to life, you just have to commit to doing it no matter what. Write every day, create images every day, even if you have a day job like I did. It’s all about dedicating yourself to your creative practice, using the resources you have, being brave in the face of rejection, and not waiting for permission to tell your story.
What was it like to make your first film?
I was lucky to grow up really close to my family in the Dominican Republic. I knew there was a story there, and it took my grandparents passing away for me to realize that I just had to write my version of it, and how it felt to lose my grandparents and that connection to the motherland.
I raised just enough money to take a crew down of mostly Hopkins film buddies to go shoot the thing. We did it scrappy. A lot of that I learned how to do at Hopkins.
What is it about your films that people connect with?
From what I heard about my first film, there was a sense of universality that people found in the specificity of the lore from my family that worked its way into the story. That’s why I love to get so nitty-gritty with characters.
How do you teach directing?
We literally analyze frame by frame: What does this composition do to me? What does this angle do? How does it emotionally impact me as a viewer? I give my students the vocabulary to establish their own visual language. We debate; it’s lively. I learned a lot of that from my own teachers at Hopkins.
Also with filmmaking, I hear the voices of my professors every time I write a line or make a decision visually.
