Working With A Film Producer: Raúl Paz-Pastrana and Gabriella García-Pardo
Artist Lab WebinarThursday, November 5, 2026
1:00-2:00 PM ET
Zoom
When is the right time to bring key collaborators onto a documentary film? Join Raúl Paz-Pastrana, (2022 Creative Capital Awardee, 2024 Guggenheim Fellow) and Gabriella García-Pardo (2026 Creative Capital State of the Art Prize Recipient) for a conversation about building the right team at every stage of a documentary’s development and production.
Drawing from their work together on Backside (nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival), they’ll share practical insights into how teams take shape and evolve throughout a project. What does each producer bring to a film, and how do their roles differ? When should you bring on an editor, field producer, or publicist? How do you identify what your project needs and when? Raúl and Gabriella will discuss the journey from development and production through post-production and release, offering strategies for identifying collaborators, defining roles, and building a flexible team that can support a documentary as it grows.
Raúl Paz-Pastrana
Raúl Paz-Pastrana is a Mexican immigrant filmmaker traversing borderlands and migrant trails. His work intersects narrative fiction, participatory filmmaking, and visual ethnography to explore themes of belonging, alienation, and the concept of “home.” Raúl’s films include Backside (2025 Tribeca, 85min) and Border South (2019 Sheffield, 84min). His films have screened worldwide, including at Tribeca, Sheffield, the Aspen ShortFest, and the Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), among many more. His work has received support from the 2022 Creative Capital Award, the Princess Grace Foundation, The Ford Foundation, LEF, ITVS, Catapult, the Jerome Foundation, and Sundance. Raúl is a Firelight Media Documentary Lab Fellow, a New America National Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Gabriella García-Pardo
Gabriella García-Pardo is a Colombian-American filmmaker whose work explores relationships between land, identity, and belonging across the US and Latin America. She produced and co-wrote La Bonga (True/False, 2023), a community co-production following the return of residents to the home from which they were displaced two decades earlier, and Backside (Tribeca, 2025), an observational portrait of the workers behind the Kentucky Derby. She directed The Bardia (Mountainfilm, 2022), following the leader of a competitive equestrian team in Morocco. She is currently directing FENCED, an exploration of physical and metaphorical boundaries. Previously, García-Pardo created short documentaries at National Geographic, filmed musicians for NPR’s Tiny Desk, and founded the Washington, DC chapter of the Video Consortium. Her work has been supported by Sundance, Catapult, Creative Capital, ITVS, Nia Tero, and Firelight Media, among others. Her cinematography has screened internationally, including at SXSW, Sundance, IDFA, Cinéma du Réel, and MoMA Doc Fortnight.