Victor Nunez

An independent filmmaker whose work twice earned the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Victor Nunez has steered clear of Hollywood and remained fairly anonymous, fusing character and place in his intimate, regional portraits of his native Florida. A founding board member of the Independent Feature Project and the Sundance Film Festival, he received his MFA in film production at UCLA and also briefly attended the American Film Institute before souring on the West Coast and returning to Tallahassee, determined to become a southern filmmaker. He began by directing educational and industrial shorts, then helmed three fictional shorts in the 1970s, establishing his practice of scripting, editing and operating the camera, a modus operandi continued on his features. Both "Taking Care of Mother Baldwin" (1970), about a boy's tentative friendship with a woman neighbor, and "Charly Benson's Return to the Sea" (1972), which followed a returning Vietnam veteran as he attempted to adjust to once familiar people and situations, were original screenplays, filmed in haunting, documentary-like black-and-white.