David Martin Porras

I’ve always loved telling stories. As a kid, I had to spend many hours behind the counter of my mother’s pharmacy waiting for her to close the store. I heard all kinds of jokes and tragedies there: unwanted pregnancies, suicide attempts, weird addictions… I was eager to share them in my own words, with my own interpretation of them. And after getting my bachelor’s degree in Barcelona and working in Madrid at Pedro Almodovar’s production company, I realized film was my art of expression. I make movies to tell stories that help make sense of the human nature.

I won a full fellowship from the Spanish Foundation “La Caixa” in 2006 that allowed me to move to Los Angeles to study an MFA in Directing at UCLA. During my time as a graduate student, I made four films that won coveted awards worldwide. For my first film in English, The Breakfast, I worked with the Primetime Emmy award-winning actress Cherry Jones. I screened my following movie, Portrait of a Couple, at the Palm Springs Short Film Festival and sold the broadcasting rights to LOGO TV. My most political film, Round Trip, was selected as a National Finalist for the 2009 Student Academy Awards and it won the Latino category of the 2009 DGA Student Awards. I graduated with my Thesis film, The Widow, for which I won the DGA Student Latino Award for the second consecutive year.

In 2010, I became a fellow of Film Independent’s Lab Project: Involve and directed my first feature Stealing Summers in Buenos Aires with James Jagger, Sophie Auster and Wilson Bethel. Right now, I am one of the episodic directors of the prestigious 2012-2014 ABC/Disney DGA Directing Program and my new short film Inside the Box starring Regina King (Ray, Southland) and Summer Glau (Firefly, Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles) has been selected in more than 100 festivals and more than 30 awards.

Inside the Box also serves as a teaser for my next feature, A Texas Story, a character-driven thriller that I’m co-writing with Julia Fontana and that deals with the criminalization of HIV. In May 2013, the screenplay won a fellowship from the Latin American Film Fund Ibermedia to participate in a screenwriting workshop in Mexico City and it won Best Thriller Screenplay in the 2015 Nashville Film Festival.