Monona Wali
Directing
Biography
Monona Wali is a short story writer and novelist, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker and screenwriter. Her stories have been published in The Santa Monica Review, Stone Canoe, Tiferet, Catamaran, A Journal of South Asian American Literature and other literary journals. She was born in Benares, India, and immigrated to the United States with her family as a young child. She has two grown daughters, Kanchan and Maya Wali-Richardson. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and teaches creative writing at Santa Monica College and volunteers with InsideOut Writers, an organization that offers writing classes for incarcerated youth.
Known For
A down and out young punk gets a job working with a seasoned repo man, but what awaits him in his new career is a series of outlandish adventures revolving around aliens, the CIA, and a most wanted '64 Chevy.
Repo Man
It is El Salvador, 1989, three years before the end of a brutal civil war that took 75,000 lives. Maria Serrano, wife, mother, and guerrilla leader is on the front lines of the battle for her people and her country. With unprecedented access to FMLN guerrilla camps, the filmmakers dramatically chronicle Maria's daily life in the war.
Maria's Story
The dilapidated former house/headquarters of South Central LA's Black Panthers is at the center of a clash between radical ideals of the past, and 1980s Buppie efforts to use white-owned platforms (banks, media) to uplift the community.
Grey Area
UCLA Student Film, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Documentary about the Sandanistas, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and their supporters in the United States. Features interviews with organizer Julio Virseños, Alex Palacios (Nicaraguan Representative to the Organization of the American States Human Rights Commission), and footage of protests in McArthur Park. It also includes news footage and excerpts from "Patria Libre O Morir," a film made about the Sandanistas in 1978.
Report on Nicaraguan Revolution
Color UCLA Student Film shot on videotape, Preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. An experiemental video short about three fashion model sisters who are under investigation for a murder. Director Shirley Clarke served as an advisor for the student film, also part of the L.A. Rebellion Collection at UCLA.