Here are five local filmmakers worthy of focus.
With Alamo City in the industry spotlight, these artists are shining
Filmmaker Dat Mayne Deewayne remembers being excited as a kid when he saw a child actor he knew in a television commercial — but then wondering why he didn’t see his friend around anymore.
“I remember my mom telling me because San Antonio isn’t a place for movies, he had to move to chase that dream,” Deewayne said. “I remember I felt challenged in that moment, that if I was going to make movies, it was going to be here.”
He’s made good on that promise he made to himself when he was 7 years old. He now runs his own production company, Good Visualz Productions, and has made some award-winning short films.
Deewayne is part of a growing community of filmmakers based in San Antonio, which is starting to garner nationwide attention. The city has been included in Moviemaker magazine’s annual list of the top 20 places for filmmakers to live and work for the past three years.
“I think our creative community is very innovative and excels at thinking outside the box,” said Krystal Jones, marketing, film and music administrator for the San Antonio Film Commission. “And that is definitely true of our filmmaking community.”
Here’s a look at five San Antonio filmmakers making a splash with their work:
Dat Mayne Deewayne
Deewayne knew he would get to filmmaking eventually, but he started his creative career in music, rapping with the group Texabama. As his fellow musicians started settling down and moving away from performing, he went through a rough patch.
“As a creative, you have something burning in you to create,” said Deewayne, 42, an alum of East Central High School. “I wasn’t doing the music, and I was just going to work and coming home, and I actually got a little depressed.”
When he picked up a camera, he said, the depression lifted right away.
That was about 10 years ago. His production company stays busy with commercials, videos and other projects. He also made the attention-getting short “Freeword: Moment of Impact.” The film, which is streaming on Amazon Prime, follows a young Black poet as he defies a new federal law limiting artistic material “in direct opposition of the American way of life.”
The short, which Deewayne plans to expand into a feature, received the Freedom Film Award from the 2019 Hollywood South Film Festival. He entered it in the NAACP’S
Cinematic Shorts Competition and was one of three finalists chosen to pull together another short film during the organization’s 2019 convention in San Antonio. They were given two days to write, two days to shoot and two days to edit, he said.
He developed “The Conference,” about a parent-teacher conference arranged because of a poem about the importance of voting, which won the competition. The prize included a budget for a mini feature, which Deewayne used for “Policing,” about a Black policewoman and her family trying to return to normal after the death of her son at the hands of a fellow officer. It was screened at the 2020 Image Awards.
Deewayne’s current projects include “The Odd Life of Shay Little,” a five-part web sitcom inspired by ’90s TV comedies. He hopes to shoot it this spring and get it online by the summer.
Felise Garcia
Felise Garcia has written all her life, but she got into the entertainment industry as an actress. When she didn’t get the kinds of roles she wanted, she decided to create them for herself.
Her first stab at it was the addictive “The Honey Trapper” web series, which can be seen on Amazon Prime. She plays the title character, whom women hire to try to figure out if their significant others are inclined to stray. She also wrote and produced the series, drawing on experience earned in 14 years in the nutrition industry.
“I have a management background,” said Garcia, 35, who was home-schooled. “It seems irrelevant, but managing and producing are pretty much the same thing, including finding the right people for jobs.”
She’s learned the specifics of filmmaking as she’s gone along.
“It really is one of those things where you study what you can, read what you can, but filmmaking, anybody will tell you that even if you get a degree (in it), it’s very hands-on and also very individualistic,” she said. “Every director has their own style, every set has their own style, and every creator has their vision for how they want it to look.”
Garcia seems to have learned well. “The Honey Trapper” has been popular on the film festival circuit, picking up more than 60 awards. It was named Best Web Series of 2020 at a range of festivals, including the New York International Film Awards, the Sicily Independent Film Awards and the Vegas Movie Awards.
A third season is possible. Garcia has an ideas for where the story could go, but she also wants to dive into some other projects, and she’d like to get into directing, as well.
Than Niles
Writer and director Than Niles wanted to work with some big guns on“luminous,” his most
recent short film, and he didn’t have to go far to find them.
The film, which Niles describes as “a love letter to the sci-fi cinema I grew up loving,” is set on a challenging night for a security guard at an energy and tech company. It stars Jesse Borrego and features special effects by Jarrod Davis, whose credits include work on “Battlestar Galactica” and “Serenity,” the feature film spun from the canceled series “Firefly.”
“We had top-tier talent, and they all came from this city,” said Niles, 31. “We didn’t have to travel very far to get our rock stars to make this thing. We shot it here, and so we’re super-proud of that.”
The film, which can be seen at bigballoonpro.com/luminous, has been screened in several film festivals and won Best Short Film at Albuquerque’s Mindfield Film Festival.
Niles, who grew up in Bandera, is a lifelong film lover. He made his first movie around the seventh grade, he said, but the first one that really counts was “A Taste of Honey,” which he made with a friend while he was studying at the University of the Incarnate Word.
“It was about these witless, dancing hit men on their way to kill someone that they were not prepared for,” he said. “We put that together and it was a blast and it was well-received and then it kind of went from there.”
Niles is developing his first full-length feature, a crime drama he hopes to shoot in the next year or so. He’s working on lining up financing and other logistics.
“The making of the film is the easy part, even though it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “It’s like every piece of the puzzle is the hardest thing. But I love every piece of it.”
Alex Ramirez
Alex Ramirez took a break from active filmmaking when there were a few COVID-19 scares during a project he was working on early in the pandemic. But he’s still creating content, working on scripts, a play and short stories for at least four hours every morning.
“Right now, I want to get all my ideas down on the page so that I have something to play with once it’s safer,” said Ramirez, 28, who graduated from John Jay High School and teaches in SAY Sí’s media arts program.
Ramirez comes from a family of film buffs — his favorite memories from childhood include trips to Santikos’ Northwest theater to watch movies with his dad — and he studied film at the University of Texas-pan American.
He’s made several short films, including his most recent, “The Quiet Shore,” about a couple struggling with the wife’s diagnosis of ALS. It’s been making the rounds on the festival circuit and has won some awards, including best drama short at the Indiex Film Festival in Los Angeles.
One of the hardest parts of the pandemic for Ramirez has been time away from fellow filmmakers.
“One thing people missed out on was not only did that halt productions, but it also kind of halted our sense of community,” he said. “I think working in this film community is one of the best things I could do as an artist. I was born here in San Antonio. I really do consider myself to be a site-specific filmmaker. This is where I make my art, and the people I get to work with are themselves budding artists, and we really feed off of each other creatively.”
Natasha Straley
The coronavirus prompted Natasha Straley to make a couple of changes. She had been spending her time between home bases in New York, Los Angeles and San Antonio, but she decided to run things from the Alamo City for the time being.
She also changed the kind of films she makes.
“Until the pandemic, it was pretty dark stuff,” said Straley, who declined to give her age. “Now I’m focusing on comedy. Things have shifted a little bit. It’s time for something silly.”
Straley, who grew up dancing and painting, initially studied architecture at the University of Texas at San Antonio. After a year, she decided to pursue a degree in acting, directing and theater instead at Texas State University in San Marcos.
She then tried to get a career going in acting but grew frustrated waiting to be cast. So she took the steps that ultimately led to her career as a writer, director and creative coach.
“It was kind of an accident,” she said. “I was really trying to create more content so I could book more work as an actor, and when I started writing and producing, I realized I really like that side of it.”
Her films have been screened at festivals across the country. Her short “Cauliflower,” in which friends dining together are confronted with steamed cauliflower, was named Best Comedy Short by the Reel East Texas Film Festival, and she received the Michelle Mower Female Filmmaker of the Year Award from the Austin Revolution Film Festival in 2018.
She is working on a full-length feature and also runs a monthly online series in which writers read their new work.
“It’s been a gift to be able to shift to Zoom, so we have talent from all over the country, and now people are collaborating in a really cool way,” she said.
One example: Straley met Austin-based writer Jessica Hewitt through the reading series and directed her new short, “Tech Guru Wanted.”