Above: Sundance Knight Fellow Monica Peña. Photo credit: Flickr user Miami Film Festival. The work of up-and-coming Miami filmmaker Monica Peña is generating some serious heat. And that’s due to her cinematic debut, “Ectotherms,” a 65-minute feature film that takes this scientific term, which refers to cold-blooded organisms dependent on outside sources for warmth, and gives it a Miami spin. The “ectotherms” in Peña’s movie are this city’s culturally cross-pollinated and disaffected youth. Shot locally over just five days, with no budget, no script (other than the director’s conceptual guidelines) and with a cast of non-actors, “Ectotherms” had its world premiere at the recently held Miami International Film Festival. Then, Variety, one of the most respected entertainment industry media outlets, ran a glowing review of the movie. That a seemingly noncommercial movie like this one can elicit such positive response is encouraging to South Florida’s independent film community—and reinforces the position that you don’t need to move to Hollywood to make interesting cinema. “Knight Foundation grantee Lucas Leyva said something really smart a while ago,” remembers Dennis Scholl, Knight Foundation’s vice president for the arts. “He said, ‘You can go to L.A. and pull cables on somebody else’s film, or you can come to Miami and make your own film.’ That has resonated with a number of very interesting, young, dynamic, independent filmmakers, and Monica represents that. She’s chosen to come back here, try to find a way, make the film she wanted to make, and the results are astonishing.” The 31-year-old Cuban-American director and writer was born and raised in Miami. She attended UCLA film school but never doubted that she needed to be in Miami to give life to her creative vision. “Whether intentionally or not, what’s coming out in a lot of the works from here is sort of this intersection of cultural heritage,” Peña says, “where our connections to our families’ past and culture have been transplanted and transformed here. That intersects with this experience of … growing up in an urban environment and the hardships that can come with that. And then, that also intersects with this very particular landscape that is like no other landscape in the world.”
