Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Mario Troncoso
A life filled with stories
Mario Troncoso, who currently serves as the director of Film and Media Ecosystems at the Springdale-based arts organization Creative Arkansas Community Hub and Exchange (CACHE), is a director and producer of documentaries and a 10-time Emmy Award winner. (He’s been nominated for 39 in all.) He’s a valuable mentor and consultant in the documentary film community, a father and, as a recent transplant from Austin, Texas, he’s a big fan of all of the outdoor activities the Ozarks has to offer.
But, above all, he’s a storyteller. Eagle-eyed, with a keen sense of detail, he seems to be someone who can be both part of the action and slightly outside of it, clocking all, missing nothing.
“I always like to be a misfit, an outsider, everywhere I go,” he says with a laugh. “So I’m pretty comfortable with all of those things. And I like to watch people.”
“Mario pays attention,” says CACHE Executive Director Allyson Esposito, who first brought Troncoso onto her team to help create OzCast, a streaming series that highlights the arts and culture scene in Northwest Arkansas. “He’s a listener. He can fully absorb what an artist is saying and tell that story, the story of another human and another creator, rather than just telling veiled versions of his own, which is what some other storytellers are good at. No judgment either way, all types of storytellers are needed — but Mario really understands how to tell the story of a community.”
“If you are lucky enough to be a close friend [with Mario,] you know how interested in other people’s stories he is,” says friend and colleague Troy Campbell, founder of the Austin- and Bentonville-based House of Songs. “Being interested is highly underrated these days.”
SELF-EDUCATED
Troncoso’s own story is cinematic enough to come straight out of one of his own documentaries. Born in 1974 in Madrid, Spain, in
“Mario has had a tremendous life thus far and so he brings his lived experiences to the table and that helps him connect with all kinds of people, from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, different classes, genders, etc. Connecting and building trust with the person whose story you are focusing on is very important in making honest and authentic films.”
— Chelsea Hernandez
the last gasps of the Franco regime, he had a rather hard-scrabble childhood. The third child of a single mom, his parents divorced when Troncoso was very young, as soon as it was legal to do so in Spain. His father, says Troncoso, was orphaned by the bombings in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.
“He suffered through this trauma and through being under a dictator for all of his youth,” Troncoso says. “And he became an alcoholic. This was a big part of everybody’s life at the time. You had to pick a side. It was not like a normal political climate. When I was a kid, there were Basque terrorists bombing Madrid. That was a pretty common scene at that time.”
Along with political strife, Madrid was also experiencing an arts and cultural renaissance. Restrictions in place under Franco were loosened, and the arts were exploding around the young Troncoso.
“That definitely influenced everything, the way I grew up,” he says. “I spent a lot of time on my own, because my mom worked three jobs. I was going to school, but I was also selftaught. That was my education, being on the street.”
He means that quite literally. When he was around 12, he says, he skipped school to tag along with a schoolmate whose Chinese parents were conducting business meetings in Spanish and needed help with translations. He was fascinated by the business of adults and tried to tag along a second time, only to be rebuffed by the friend’s parents, who ordered him back to school. Instead, Troncoso says, he went to the movies. As he did the next day. And the next. Until he had skipped an entire year of school without his mother finding out.
“That’s the time when I learned everything I needed to know about so many things,” he says with a quick laugh.
Still, when he finally revealed all to his mother — including the fact that he would have to repeat a grade — he was surprised by how well she took it.
“She’s always been supportive of everything I’ve done,” he says. “I owe her everything.”
Troncoso’s life would soon get a lot more demanding when, two years later, his father’s health declined, and Troncoso took over his business — a busy newsstand — full time. He was only 14, and he had to drop out of school. He never returned to earn his high school diploma. He worked from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and dealt with newspaper vendors and the bank. He was running a business full time, a child with adult-sized responsibilities, with the charged political climate adding yet another layer of stress.
“The newsstand was in a neighborhood that was mostly senior military housing,” he remembers. “All of these people when they would get up and get a paper, the next thing they would do before they get in the car, they have to go underneath and look all around the car and make sure there wasn’t a bomb under the car. So I’m watching them do this right next to me.”
Troncoso was stuck in a kind of limbo — he desperately wanted to go to college to study acting or filmmaking but lacked his high school diploma. At that time, Spain had a mandatory military service requirement, so Troncoso followed his older brother into the Air Force, but it was clearly not a good fit for him, he says. He quit after satisfying the requirement and parlayed his precocious business experience into opening up a music venue.
“I started helping some friends open bars — that was the thing to do at the time, I guess,” he says. “And I thought, ‘I’m going to help myself next time.’”
His venue hosted six or seven shows a week, and Troncoso managed it all — publicity, booking, business contracts with food and drink services. But he still yearned to go to college. When a friend who had moved to Houston told him about the GED — a high school equivalency test that would allow him to go to school in the United States — he uprooted his life and moved to Texas. Within months — and with almost no English comprehension at all — he had passed the GED exam. The last barrier to college had been conquered.
CULTURE SHOCK
Houston, says Troncoso, was a real culture shock. As a movie buff, Troncoso’s only knowledge of the United States was what he saw on the big screen, and Houston did not resemble what he was expecting.
“Once you realize how many poor people are in this country — that is shocking,” he notes. “That is not what you see in the movies.
“I was an immigrant in a city of immigrants, and that part was great. In Houston, everybody was really welcome, and there are people from all over the world. I spent most of my time there with immigrants, because I was trying to learn as much as I could from other people. So that was my community for a time, because of the language barrier at the beginning — that was the easiest way to learn something.”
Still determined to become a filmmaker, he moved to the neighborhood of Montrose as soon as he felt comfortable with the language and started taking college classes. This colorful, eclectic area was an artist enclave where he immediately felt at home — and embraced.
It was in Houston where he was first introduced to documentaries, by the woman who would eventually become his wife. (The two are now separated.) He soon discovered he was learning more out of school than he was in it, so he dropped his studies mid-program to gain practical experience. In 2003, he and his wife returned for a visit to Madrid, only to be stopped at the airport; it was two years postSept. 11, 2001, when security was at its highest, and Troncoso’s passport was missing a stamp. When he was told it could take up to six months to rectify the situation, he and his wife decided to take a chance and stay in the country for a while. They sent for their pet cats, and Troncoso found work with a fast-paced production studio that made nature documentaries for television. When Troncoso realized that he could easily juggle working on 10 to 12 documentaries at a time, he realized he had a marketable skill — but it was not one that he wanted to spend making nature documentaries, which turned out to be too scripted, too predictable, for his expansive sense of creativity. When he was accepted to the film program at the University of Texas at Austin, the couple moved back to the United States.
It was in Austin that a period of wild success was triggered for Troncoso. It started when he landed a job at PBS producing “Arts in Context,” a documentary that highlighted local arts and artists.
“The documentaries he created elevated the Austin arts scene to a national audience,” says Austin colleague Sara Robertson. “Looking back at this body of work, he really captured a special time of Austin’s arts scene.”
He would eventually produce 32 episodes of the show from 2012 to 2016, racking up Emmy nominations and awards along the way. Also in 2012, a short film he had made, “Clowns Never Lie,” was accepted to the Cannes Film Festival. “It’s one of the more hauntingly poetic shorts to come out of the Austin film scene in some time, perfectly capturing the tenuous and tentative essence of the street performer foregrounded against a very Europeanseeming depiction of bustling South Congress,” wrote Austin arts reporter Marc Savlov about the film.
Troncoso had started a family by this time, and the regular work of “Arts in Context” was a solid, reliable paycheck. But, he says, “once I achieved what I wanted with that program, I was done.”
“I always have about 20 projects in my head at all times,” he says, and each one spurs him on to the next. “As soon as I premiere one thing, I basically hate it. And I have to move on to the next.”
MENTOR/MAKER
One of Troncoso’s talents is the ability to mentor other filmmakers. He frequently consults on others’ projects. Often, that’s how he ends up taking on a new project of his own.
“I will go in to pitch a show, and the people I’m pitching to have an idea for something else, and they ask, ‘Would you do it?’” he says with a laugh. “And so I often end up not working on my own project. I’m happy to do it. But it’s often like, you still have all of these things in the back of your head, things you want to make.”
Troncoso’s recent work is highly relevant to the current political climate and includes “Fake: Searching for Truth in the Age of Misinformation,” a documentary that helps educate the public on mass media misinformation and bias, and “Building the American Dream,” which details the travails of three immigrant families battling exploitation within the construction industry.
Always restless, always looking for the next challenge, Troncoso says he was intrigued when Esposito contacted him about creating a web series that highlighted the arts scene in Northwest Arkansas. He was already very familiar with Northwest Arkansas; he and Campbell were close friends by this time, and when Campbell opened an outpost of his House of Songs organization in Bentonville, Troncoso started visiting. He was in the process of starting a foundation that, he says, would “support creative entrepreneurs and storytellers — because of my own experience. I never had a clear path. I had to figure it out on my own. I want to find the people who didn’t follow the traditional educational path and help them with the information I have, in the context that I have.”
Bentonville, he says, seemed like a good setting for a pilot program. When Esposito tapped Troncoso to help create OzCast, it seemed like a perfect opportunity for him to settle even further into the community. The project, he says, helped “to create opportunities for artists that weren’t there before. It opened doors for CACHE, and it was a way to expose many people here to other places. Allyson is sharing the content with people all over the country. And we did that, even during the pandemic.”
“He and Jesse [Elliott, CACHE director of Music Ecosystems,] really conceived of the whole project together, and Mario brought a new throughline and eyeball for talent,” says Esposito. “Then he and Lisa Marie Evans, our editor and animator and a multimedia artist herself, did the months-long heavy lifting of getting all these amazing artists wrangled from all these different disciplines and disparate corners of our region. At a certain point, the project transitioned from Mario to Lisa Marie, just as it had from Jesse to Mario, and, with each iteration, we got a new flavor and a new leadership and sense of community added to the mix. That’s how it ended up this beautiful collage of humans and artworks, I think — because everyone like Mario who worked on it was generous enough to pass it along, to open it up, to let it grow in the direction it needed.”
The working relationship between CACHE and Troncoso was successful enough that Esposito offered Troncoso a permanent position with the organization.
“They asked if I could help them build a film and media ecosystem in the region,” he says. “I’m here right now to map things out, figure out what is already here, how can we build something here that is attractive to people to work here, or at least not to leave. A lot of it is what I was already planning to do, but now I’m doing it with them. I really believe in what they’re doing, and I’m happy to be part of the team as long as I can help.”
SO MANY STORIES
Troncoso’s commitment to the region was cemented when he relocated to the area this spring.
“My kids, when they come here, they really love it,” he says. “And we were doing a weekly show. It’s hard for people who have never done a weekly or any monthly show, any type of series, to really understand the amount of time it takes. You have to be available all day, every day of the week. I could tell from the beginning that I needed to come and be more involved than I was supposed to be. My goal was to make sure it happened. I didn’t want it to fail.”
“Mario is very influenced by community and where he lives and sees arts playing an integral function in society,” notes Robertson. “Wherever he has lived, be it Spain, Houston, Austin or Northwest Arkansas, he has seen potential for positive civic change through art. He is able to see a community’s unique personality that provides a real sense of place and pride.”
As far as future projects, Troncoso is biding his time. The pandemic brought some tentative plans to an abrupt halt, but Troncoso is hopeful that the business of filmmaking is recovering after a year-plus hiatus, and there’s little doubt he’ll be part of the recovery. Just what that means for him is yet to be seen.
“I have some ideas,” he says. “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I want to learn.
“There are so many stories to tell.”