Roy Alvarez

About

I was born in Los Angeles, California, but a few months later, I was to go on a journey about which only a few scattered pictures and malleable memories remain.

My grandfather had just retired from working in a factory near Los Angeles, and to celebrate the occasion, my family planned a vacation to visit their home country. This was the beginning of a long road trip from 952 S. Western Ave, Apt 4 to a city called Zapote, near El Redondel –the bullfight arena- in San José, Costa Rica.

They bought a van, packed it up, drove it around the block, and decided it could endure the nearly 3, 500-mile trip. As the story goes, by the time we reached El Salvador, my grandmother had talked enough times on the phone with her sister in Costa Rica to make up her mind: She wasn’t going to return to the United States at the end of their vacation. Indeed she never did. Although, she omitted to tell my grandfather until the day before they were to supposed to head up to the United States. My mother had just turned 18 and with a newborn to take care of, she stayed behind as well, while her brothers returned to California and her father made arrangements to sell all their belongings to move permanently to Costa Rica.

My mother later moved to a small coffee town west of San José named Escazú, where I grew up and spent my formative years among idyllic rolling hills, furniture artisans in a family of modest means.

I attended Universidad de Costa Rica and graduated with a Licentiate Degree in Sociology. Later, I became an adjunct lecturer in Sociology at Universidad Nacional, and the artistic producer for the Program for Cultural Identity, Arts and Technology at the same university.

I took several video and audio production workshops offered at Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje and worked on documentary production before moving the United States for graduate school.

I hold a Masters Degree in Documentary Journalism and New Media from University of Illinois at Urbana, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Film and Arts and Technology from University of Wisconsin where I worked as a researcher and screenwriting instructor until recently. I’ve done documentary work for the MillerCoors Company, the Roberto Hernadez Center at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, as well as for independent artists.

I apply my academic training and professional experience to researching and developing projects about social and historical phenomena in the Social Sciences in the Arts. My work tends to gravitate around personal and intimate issues framed within a larger context. I seek stories about people through whom one can get a larger sense about the world we live in. I approach filmmaking as social and political commentary about our times, expressed in the voice of seemingly conventional individuals whose lives inform on society’s cultural pulse: to borrow from Pierre Bourdieu, the agent and his/her field.

A symptom is a word trapped in the flesh. I am also interested in the nursing nature of storytelling, its memory foundational process and its capacity for identity reinvention. I tend to work with my subjects during multiple sessions and over a long period of time, to help them paint a less calculated and contrived representation of themselves and their issues, allowing them to decouple their rationalizations from their memories as they revisit their histories.

I am currently working on two new projects, one about a U.S. Army soldier deployed to Iraq in the early days of the invasion. Using personal footage shot in Iraq, we retrace his case of posttraumatic stress disorder and the constitution of his national identity. The other project, Pan de Elote (Corn Bread), is a story about the rapid changes introduced in the landscape of my hometown in Costa Rica, where new urban development is disrupting the social and cultural fabric of the place.