Author Salvador Carrasco

Salvador Carrasco

Salvador Carrasco is a Mexican film director based in Santa Monica, California. He is the writer, director, and editor of the highly acclaimed and influential feature film La otra conquista (The Other Conquest, 1999) about the Spanish colonization of Mexico, which was a cultural breakthrough and the highest-grossing historical drama in Mexican cinema at the time of its release. It was selected by The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times as one of the Top Ten Films of 2000, and re-released theatrically by Alliance Atlantis in 2008, achieving a 90% score by Rotten Tomatoes’ top critics. Carrasco has won numerous film and academic awards, and is currently developing new projects through his production company, Salvastian Pictures, including film adaptations of stories by preeminent writers Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Stephen Graham Jones. Carrasco has taught directing at USC and the LA Film School, and screenwriting at Pomona College as the Moseley Fellow in Creative Writing. Carrasco is a tenured film professor at Santa Monica College, where he is founder and Head of the Film Production Program, featured in Variety magazine. Carrasco has been a guest film director at CinemadaMare in Italy, along with directors Margarethe von Trotta, Paolo Sorrentino, and Krzysztof Zanussi. His critical essays have been published by the Los Angeles Times, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and The Nation Books, among others.

Luis Buñuel’s El in the Face of Cultural Appropriation and the #MeToo Movement: A Filmmaker’s Reappraisal

Salvador Carrasco

May 2021

Feature Articles

To my daughter Cassandra Before the first consumer-grade videotapes came out in the mid-1970s, it stands to reason that movies were not that readily available for the general public. If you were a well-estab...

Come and See The Painted Bird: A Filmmaker’s Plea

Salvador Carrasco

October 2020

Feature Articles

Recently I saw what will most likely be my favourite film of the past year and foreseeable future, especially in light of the pandemic: The Painted Bird (Václav Marhoul, 2019), from the Czech Republic. I made a...

Being There Without Being There in the Era of COVID-19: A Filmmaker’s Perspective

Salvador Carrasco

July 2020

Feature Articles

Under the current restrictions of lockdown and quarantine, in which we are being asked not to leave our homes, “hands-on filmmaking” has become virtually impossible, at least in the sense of a group of people c...