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'Films, in my opinion, are the greatest thing'

Isa Guerrero wins three awards at 2024 BC Student Film Festival
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Whistler's Isa Guerrero earned three awards at the 2024 BC Student Film Festival.

Young, talented athletes get quite a bit of exposure in the Sea to Sky corridor. The same isn’t always true for youthful creatives… and perhaps that ought to change. 

One such artist is Isa Guerrero, who first elevated his profile with a victory at the 2023 Sea to Sky Students Film Festival (S2SFF). The Whistler Secondary School (WSS) student replicated his victory at this year’s S2SFF with a short piece called La Mort, which also earned him three awards at the BC Student Film Festival. 

Most Promising Young Filmmaker, Top Junior Narrative and Top Junior Cinematography. Not bad at all for a 14-year-old. 

“It’s probably the biggest achievement I have,” Guerrero figures. “I was nominated for seven categories, so that’s also [amazing]. Even though [my other two awards] are special, Most Promising Young Filmmaker basically says that you have a future. I think that means a lot because people are eager to see what your next film is.” 

La Mort tells a sombre tale of a young man grappling with the death of his mother. It tugs at the heartstrings over the course of its five-minute runtime with subdued colours, minimal but impactful dialogue and a melancholy string soundtrack. One might assume that Guerrero found inspiration from a specific source—a personal tragedy, perhaps—but that’s not the case. 

Instead, Guerrero found himself in a position most students are familiar with: crunch time. With mere weeks to go until the S2SFF, he needed a concept and discovered one on his flight to Italy for a family vacation. Finding himself unable to sleep, the young man began to brainstorm. 

Guerrero likes to think he works well under pressure, and he evidently does. 

What films offer 

Though he admits to having watched “probably way too many movies”, Guerrero can’t pinpoint a specific moment in life that piqued his interest in filmmaking. He’s been trying some facsimile of acting since he was six years old, walking behind his parents outside or envisioning himself on a set at school. 

At nine or 10, Guerrero began experimenting on iMovie. Unlike many of his peers, who were just messing around, he grew to take films seriously. Things really changed in grade seven when he picked up his older brother Javier’s camera for a school project. 

Guerrero certainly knows how to pick his professional role models. The late Italian Sergio Leone is his favourite director: known for helming Clint Eastwood’s iconic Dollars Trilogy of Westerns (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly). Regarded as one of cinema’s most influential filmmakers, Leone frequently juxtaposed extreme close-ups with long shots in his work. 

Other directors in Guerrero’s personal hall of fame include Martin Scorcese, Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky and Akita Kurosawa. The teen tends to watch older movies rather than fully giving himself to contemporary trends like the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but he’ll appreciate most genres outside of romance and comedy. 

“Films, in my opinion, are the greatest thing,” says Guerrero. “They offer so much and can bring you into a story. You have amazing cinematography in a lot of movies, which is obviously very appealing to your eyes. And there's so many people and things that go behind-the-scenes in film—thousands of people working on one movie. It can really bring you into something that regular life can't.” 

Guerrero isn’t certain that he’ll try for film school, acknowledging that it isn’t always a viable career path. That said, he hopes to continue making movies for as long as possible. Who knows? Sometimes, you only need one big hit to break into the industry.