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Logline

The Symbiotic Film Experiment is built on the understanding that filmmaking is a strange amalgamation of every art form that came before it, and one of the most inaccessible.

This project brings that spectrum of creative languages into the hands of communities who live in the peripheries. The journey experiments with music, painting, image and performance and leads to the creation of a collective hybrid film.

Synopsis

The Symbiotic Film Experiment is an itinerant community filmmaking program rooted in three bodies of thought: Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Ignacio Martín-Baró’s Liberation Psychology, and the Third Cinema movement pioneered by Getino and Solanas. Together these frameworks share a conviction that creative self-expression is not a luxury but a fundamental human need, and that the communities most systematically excluded from cultural institutions are the ones with the most urgent stories to tell.

Each cohort is based on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and allows attendees to experience the full spectrum of art forms that feed into film. Music, visual art, writing, movement and image-making are not treated as separate disciplines but as a single interconnected process. This is what symbiosis means here. The arts feed each other, and the community feeds the work.

The methodology draws on the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation, the process by which inner life finds form through creative expression. SFE treats filmmaking as a collective act of sublimation, one that has the possibility to bring psychological balance and shared meaning to groups who have never been invited to make a film.

The final film is hybrid by design, part documentary, part fiction, with authorship and roles shared across the whole community. There is no single director. The themes, form and genre emerge from the process itself, different every time, shaped by the place and the people.

SFE is an experiment because nothing is fixed. The only commitment is to show up, make something together, and let that change you.

Meet the Filmmakers

Fernando Hendrixs Torres — Founder/Director
Fernando Hendrixs Torres is a documentary filmmaker and community psychologist who works at the intersection of non-fiction story telling, creativity in service of mental health, and community empowerment. Over fifteen years, he has directed more than a dozen documentaries featured at international film festivals, museums, and television broadcast platforms. He recently completed his first feature Echoes Go Far Back, which explores music and identity among UK-based diasporic artists.

Throughout his practice he has worked within the “Clubhouse” model for community mental health, cultural institutions, and social impact organizations across the US, UK, and Latin America. He has designed and facilitated arts-based psychosocial programs for adults living with serious mental illness, refugees and asylum seekers, and underserved border and Indigenous communities.

Fernando is currently based in the US, where he continues to develop documentary projects and community programming rooted in Liberation Psychology and Latin American Third Cinema. Fernando holds an MSc in Media and Communications (Media Practice) with Distinction from Brunel University London, where he received the Peter Caws Prize for Best Postgraduate Dissertation and the Vice Chancellor’s Excellence Award. He also holds a BSc in Psychology from University of Costa Rica, where he was a researcher at the LAUDI Institute.

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Contact

For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.