REEL DE ORO

Born in Havana, Cuba, Asori Soto is a director/producer with an art history BA from the University of Havana and trained in documentary filmmaking through NYU Tisch at the Ludwig Foundation in Cuba. He began his career in the early 2000s as an active founder of the Cuban Independent Film Movement, producing and directing two low-budget feature films, several short films and commercials. Asori later moved to Los Angeles, where he spent a couple of years producing short-form content before becoming an Executive Producer at The Cortez Brothers, a commercial production company.

Asori is currently directing and producing a wide range of projects, from branded content videos to full-length documentaries. The first of these projects is Cuban Food Stories. His upcoming projects include the docu-series Food Stories inspired by this film and his discovery of the relationship between culinary traditions and cultural heritage values. Asori resides in the East Village, New York City.

Q: How is being Cuban permeates in your work?
AS: The fact that I began my career in Cuba has strongly branded my work. On the one hand, when you study cinema in Cuba, your education is very influenced by international cinema. Instead of watching mostly American cinema, you are trained also in European, Asian, Latin American, Arabic and African cinema. This gives you a broader influence and enables you to understand and create work with a more global vision. On the other hand, in order to make movies in Cuba you have to be very resourceful, you have to learn to create a lot with nothing. In each shoot you try to achieve maximum production values using the minimum amount of resources that are available. For instance, in my first fiction film Vedado, an 80-minute film shot with a budget of only US$ 400, you can see the influence of the work of Krzysztof Kieslowsk and Wong Kar Wai.

Q: When did you realize that this was what you wanted to do?
AS: Since my early childhood my way of learning English was watching movies and animated films without subtitles. I watched many movies every week. Over time, cinema became for me a source of intense emotions which I needed to live. When I was in high school, I saw Memorias del Subdesarrollo of Tomás Gutierrez Alea, a Cuban film that changed the way I saw cinema and welcomed me to the New Wave of French cinema. From that moment I knew that I wanted to devote my entire life to directing and producing films.

Q: How will you define your visual style?
AS: I believe that each project must have its own identity, its own visual style. And this is something I try to do for in each piece I make. It is not the same to make an artistic documentary -which is a personal exploration like Cuban Food Stories-, that doing a branded content doc for a brand like Google. If I had to define something that is constant is that many of the pieces, I do are inspired in pieces that have impacted me throughout life.

Q: How do your documentary and fiction projects coexist with advertising?
AS: Working on totally different projects at the same time is something that I enjoy a lot. Every project you do teaches you a lot, it changes you not only as a creator but as a human being. The creative teams you work with, the people you interview, the characters you write about, everything gives you something. However different they may seem, all this constant experience you take it from one project to another. In the end, everything is interwoven.

Q: In which projects have you worked recently?
AS: I’ve had fun the last months, I’ve filmed four collaborations with Google and we’ve started filming Mis dos madres (My two mothers), a documentary project staring the film and theater actress Olga Merediz. In addition, we are working on the promotion for the release of my documentary feature Cuban Food Stories in iTunes (North America, February 12) and in Amazon Prime (Europe, February 26).

Q: Where is Asori Soto heading?
AS: What drives me is encouraging the connection with different audiences by creating of content, whether in the world of advertising or cinema. On the one hand, with Cortez Brothers a new chapter of advertising partnerships with general and Hispanic market brands is opening. And regarding filmmaking, I am developing two new very funny films, The Escape (comedy, fiction) and Mexican Food Stories (follow-up to Cuban Food Stories) aiming that both can be filmed during the next two years.

Production Company:
Cortez Brothers, US
Contact: Martin Feuerstein
T +1-310-821-8280

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