Israel Cárdenas
Directing
Biography
Israel Cárdenas is a Mexican film director, editor, cinematographer and producer based in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán founded Aurora Dominicana, an independent film production company.
Known For

Ramin flees from persecution in Iran and ends up living in the limbo of exile, far from everything he knows, in the tropical port town of Veracruz, Mexico. There his nostalgia and melancholy are confronted with new friendships, while he starts to rediscover his own desires.
Fireflies

Deep in the jungle, a group of Mexican gum workers crosses their path with Agnes, a mysterious Belizean woman. Her presence enlivens the fantasies and desires of those men, without knowing that they have woken up an ancient Mayan legend.
Tragic Jungle

Remembers an artist in the form of a somnambulistic fantasy: A filmmaker faces increasing challenges as she tries, decades later, to complete Dominican filmmaker Jean-Louis Jorge’s unfinished work.
Holy Beasts

Dante spends his days between factories, skateboards and corpses, but the only thing he cares about is the Death Metal band he plays in with his best friends. Lucy, the girlfriend of his comatose brother, comes to visit, and here presence will cause chaos, confusion, but also hope.
Death to Summer

Two young indigenous brothers from the La Sierra Tarahumara region of northwest Mexico return home from Benito Juarez elementary boarding school, only to find their fates pulling them in opposite directions in director Laura Amelia Guzmán's dramatic meditation on the value of culture and the cost of progress.
Cochochi

Every afternoon Noelí, a young Dominican woman, hangs out on the beach at Las Terrenas. With her boyfriend, Yeremi, they look for ways to make a living at the expense of one of the hundreds of tourists there. However Noelí also has a steady client, Anne, a much older French woman, who, like many other Europeans, has found an idyllic refuge on the island to spend her last years. For Noelí, the relationship is one of convenience, but the feelings become more intense as they plan to leave together for Paris.
Sand Dollars

Behind the dark, sensuous and almost hallucinatory images, a grim story is smouldering about a school teacher and social activist, who after a questionable trial was convicted for killing four police officers in a Mexican province.
The Letters

After fifteen years in an American jail, a man returns to the Dominican Republic. As he faces family problems, he turns to illegal street fighting and is discovered by an Italian ex-boxer.
Sambá

Miriana “Miwi" awakens at midnight to find out her sister Juliana had an accident. We don't have more information, just the vertiginous impulse of Miwi to take some food, money, a cell phone and start the car in order to accompany her sister on a trip where she will find some clues about what happened. We view the history from Miwi's point of view while we found out the events that occurred sharing with her the pain and bewilderment.
Heights

A French woman of African descent manages to escape after being arrested in the Dominican Republic. She finds shelter in the most dangerous district of Santo Domingo, where she is taken in by a group of children. By becoming their protégée and maternal figure, she will see her destiny change inexorably.
Bantú Mama

Shy girl Miriam is waiting to celebrate her 15th birthday and she wants to invite her guy. So far they’ve only chatted online, and the anticipated blind date only complicates things.
Miriam Lies

An intimate portrait of four children coming of age and the role of music in their journey. The children tell their stories through Bachata, a once proscribed music that has become the Dominican Republic's primary cultural export.
Bittersweet

Following a suicide attempt, 19 year old Lito travels from Monterrey to Querétaro to visit his 20 years old cousin Koko; where he joins his group of friends with the intention of selling drugs to pay for a weekend trip to the beaches of Michoacán. Among psychotropic pills, LSD and mushrooms; among improvised friendships and trips to nature, a bond is created reinforcing their friendship; while Lito seems to find the path towards reconciliation.
Psychotropic Sunrise
Filmed with irony, the film describes brief moments in the lives of tourists, workers, and local vacationers around the construction of an artificial beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Site of Sites

Set in an upper-class neighbourhood of the Dominican Republic, La Hembrita is an unsettling portrait of a middle-aged woman, Dominique, and her relations with family, servants and entourage.
Babygirl

Nearly half a century ago, Carmen Ignarra arrived to Mexico after leaving behind her Cuban homeland, in the hopes of becoming the greatest Caribbean actress in Hollywood. But the American dream tur- ned out to be more difficult than she’d thought, and her brief initial success was followed by a slow, painful decline. Today, at 80, the woman who was once Cuba’s most beautiful actress lives totally forgotten in an old mansion in Monterrey. There she survives thanks to her tenants—strange men who she is constantly blaming for mysterious thefts and disappearances. Laura, a young woman also from the Caribbean, arrives at the mansion to work as an assistant in cleaning and housekeeping. With her she brings a video camera and the secret intention of making a documentary about the diva. Together they talk about the past, about wasted talent and lost loves.
Carmita

Noelí becomes an actress and travels to Europe, where she reunites with her mother and starts feeling homesick.
Noelí Overseas
Inspired by true events, the film follows a young man struggling to reclaim his freedom inside a shelter ruled by a woman whose authority blends maternal care with strict control. As he navigates loyalty, fear, and the desire to escape, the fragile boundaries between protection and domination begin to unravel.
The Big Family

An elderly comedian is buried up to his neck in the Mexican desert. A bitter young woman threatens to pulp his head with a nail bat; the only thing that can stall her are his stories of a mythical threshold behind which lies the absolute truth. Is she in his dream or he in hers? Or were they once the Bonnie-and-Clyde-like couple we keep seeing, exacting their revenge on the world?
Drown Among the Dead

Mena, an architecture professor in the midst of an existential crisis and facing bribery attempts from one of his students, disappears without a trace.