Meet Juan Paulo Laserna, Winner of the Focus Features Award for Social and Cultural Impact

On May 13, Juan Paulo Laserna won the Focus Features Award for Social and Cultural Impact at the Columbia University Film Festival for Not My Name.

In Not My Name, an upper-class family from Bogotá in the ‘90s must travel through areas controlled by rebel forces to visit an ailing grandfather. The youngest child, Alvaro (Damian Samper), who must adopt a false identity, is forced to confront the emotional reality and potential violence of war.

After growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, Laserna pursued Mandarin Studies in Beijing before getting his BFA in film directing from New York City’s School of Visual Arts, where he won best editing, directing, and film for his first feature, Las Malas Lenguas. He received his MFA with honors from Columbia University.

We asked Laserna to tell us a little about the inspiration for his film, the artists who influenced him, and his plans for the future.

Follow him on Instagram: @Laserna93

Where did the idea for Not My Name come from?

In the ‘90s, Colombia was in absolute chaos. As a child, I loved watching TV, but my parents limited it to cartoons, making it very clear I was completely forbidden from watching the news. One day, curiosity got the better of me, and I broke the rule, watching a whole news segment dedicated to how some villagers had been dismembered by guerrillas.

When you grow up within that world, you normalize it, internalizing the brutal reality. Fear entered our homes, forcing us to mature early on. Not My Name is about that seed of violence that is planted through fear and pain, separating us from the innocence of childhood. It is a story largely based on these frightful road trips we had to undertake from Bogotá to visit my grandfather’s city of Ibagué, never knowing what outcome the road might bring. The changes in identity were real, and the fact that the guerrillas would interrogate the youngest child for the truth was too, repeatedly making me replace my real identity with the one that we had to use on the road. I grew to be a very aggressive child and the origins of that behavior were something I wanted to explore and unearth, because experiences like this define you for the rest of your life. This story explores this through the lens of a kid losing the most basic part of his identity: his name. 


How did you find your cast, especially the young boy who plays the lead?

We worked with an amazing casting agency. We met over one hundred kids in the process of finding Alvaro. It was essential that our child actors understand the emotional impact of the film and, more importantly, that they could differentiate reality from fiction. It is very hard for most 8-year-olds to understand that the angry father or the soldiers are just a fiction and not reality. Damian was the only one who was mature enough at that age to not only understand the difference but also embrace the journey of his character. He wanted to be an actor because he wanted to know what it felt like to be in somebody else’s shoes.

Finding the two parents was easier because there was a wider range of professional actors we had access to. We just had to find the inner rage of the father and the rebellious sweetness of the mother. Mafe, the sister, was an incredible actress for her age. When I met her in casting, I knew immediately that she was the right one. We did many improvs with the family to test them together and amazing things came out that then made it into the film.

Directing children can be notoriously difficult. How did you work with your cast?

Many directors say that 90% of directing actors is casting, and I think that it is the same when working with children. You’re not only casting them for a role, you’re also seeing how they are as people and how they will behave under the circumstances that a set will bring. It is as important to cast the parents as it is to cast the children, since the parents need to be 100% on board with everything or your film could very easily fall apart. Once I found these two wonderful actors, we went together through the whole script, talking about what things were happening and why. This set up the basis for the rehearsals and ultimately gave them a solid basis for the film. It was essential that the children connected to their characters and that they were doing this film because they wanted and not because they were convinced to do it, each giving incredible input in the process.

What in the finished film best captures what you saw when you wrote the screenplay?

I think that the final film very well captures Alvaro’s change, from the innocence and sweetness of the beginning to his pain and ultimate rage at the end. I realized from the script that this was going to be very difficult to achieve, and that’s why we spent a good amount of time rehearsing with the kids, so that these difficult emotions could be something they understood with time and that we could tap into them when shooting, because the whole success of the film hinged on that.

What was the biggest lesson learned working on Not My Name?

I think the biggest lesson was that when adapting and developing content that is so close to your life, it is essential to understand that it must be able to stand alone as fiction, regardless of the reality behind it. It is easy for strong feelings from the past to influence your own take of the film, occasionally blurring the lines of what works and what doesn’t because you want to be truthful to what really happened, even if an audience without context won’t perceive it the same way. Ultimately, it can hurt the film.

What does it mean to you to win the “Award for Social and Cultural Impact”?

The reason I became a filmmaker was to explore the human condition through my own lens of dark, dramatic humor, yet all my stories also have a deeper intent to speak to social and cultural issues that I’m passionate about and that I believe deserve to be discussed. For this reason, this award is an incredible honor, not only because it is a recognition of the intended impact of the film, but because it is coming from Focus Features, which in my eyes, is one of the most prestigious and respected film companies around. It is an award that gives the film an amazing platform of support, whilst at the same time boosting our feature film project for this short to move ahead.

As an emerging filmmaker, who are your influences (filmmakers, artists, writers, or friends)?

When I was in the eighth grade, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the mastery with which Gabriel Garcia Marquez delved into the conflicted soul of Colombia revealed to me that the outlet of my painful childhood was to be a storyteller. Although it was literature that drove my decision, I found film to be the medium that attracted me the most, as I came to believe that a great movie can change the people who watch it, and, in that way, it can change the world. I was fascinated by Stanley Kubrick, David Fincher, and Alejandro González Iñarritu, as each of them challenged conventional morality through complex characters, never shied away from holding a mirror back at society, and did it in a deeply entertaining way. The beauty with which Sebastião Salgado photographed tragedy, the dark, unsettling humor of Kenzaburō Ōe’s Japanese novels, and Orwell’s dystopian metaphors of society, all deeply influenced my love for images, stories, and ultimately carved me into an artist with a bittersweet taste of being human.

What was the first film you saw that made you want to be a filmmaker and why?

It was literature that made me decide to be a filmmaker, but the first film that really made me fall in love with movies was A Clockwork Orange. I watched it when I was way too young, like when I was 9, and it revealed to me the shocking, colorful, musical, and violent world of adults in a way that I had never seen before. Everything that I was taught about morality was flipped on its head, mixed and churned out through Beethoven’s music, making it no longer a battle of good versus evil, but a bittersweet exploration of the human soul. It was films like these that expanded my limited view of the world and made me want to become a filmmaker, but most importantly, that allowed me to persevere through a notoriously difficult industry.

Are you working on another feature film? What is it about?

I am in the process of developing multiple feature projects, but the most promising one is the feature film version of Not My Name. It is an expansion of the world of the short, developing what happens to the family when they actually face the armed insurgents, how Alvaro deals with the loss of his grandfather alongside the loss of his innocence, and how the internalized violence and fear he experiences not only changes him but his entire family. The feature film ultimately takes us to explore how violence makes people migrate, shining a light on the tumultuous moment that we’re living through now. For this project, we have had the support of the Film Independent Producing and Screenwriting Labs and of the PGA Create Lab, giving the project important momentum that we are working to translate into the right partners for making the film next year.