Young filmmaker Rita Amador, SVHS ‘13, is pursuing her dream in NYC

Sonoma Valley High School graduate Laura “Rita” Amador, class of 2013, produced a film, “La Liberte Eclairant Le Monde” as a class project at New York University, where she is finishing her junior year. To her delight, the film was shown at the Petaluma Student Film Festival on April 1, and was one of four films from that festival selected to screen at Film Fest Petaluma last weekend.

Amador’s film is about a young French woman who seeks to understand her unusual infatuation with the Statue of Liberty.

She first began making films in high school, but she says her filmmaking education really took off at Santa Rosa Junior College. After completing two years, she was accepted as a film and television studies transfer student into New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“One of my professors recently told the class to ‘make sure your ending is both unexpected and inevitable’” said Amador. “Although he was discussing elements of screenwriting, I hold these same sentiments near and dear to my own life.”

This year she lived in one of NYU’s apartment-style dorm in Chinatown, but when she returns for the fall semester, she will be living in an off-campus apartment in Manhattan or Brooklyn.

“I can confidently say that in the past year, I have bled, sweat, and absolutely bawled film, and somehow, miraculously, I am about to finish my first school year at NYU,” she said. “Unexpected? Yes. Inevitable? I’d like to think so. The ending? Far from it.”

Her future plan is “to be a professional storyteller.”

“Whether this means a director, screenwriter, production designer or a mixture of all three and more, I want to bring stories to life, to connect to people, places, and ideas that already exist in our world, and for those that don’t, I want to create them,” says Amador.

Next up for Amador is a short experimental film that she wrote and directed called “Earthworm” about a woman who has worms in her brain and her journey through decomposition and rebirth. And she’ll be back in Sonoma this summer, spending some time with her parents, working and interviewing for internships.