Alejandra Parody, a Tisch and Stern alum, started her filmmaking journey with a love for storytelling, but evolved into something much larger. Exploring her passion for writing and directing while studying Film & TV at NYU led Parody to several film festival nominations and, surprisingly, to successful consulting company Deloitte.
In an interview with WSN, Parody discussed finding her love of filmmaking, switching gears to pursue business and exploring her cultural identity through film.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WSN: How did you realize you wanted to pursue film?
Parody: I always liked telling stories, and in school, people would turn to me to retell something that happened, maybe because I make a lot of expressions with my face. I had good grades, and a good relationship with my teachers so I started to ask them if I could turn in video essays instead of written ones. I thought it would be more fun. I began to get interested in how written things could be translated into that medium, and this experience gave me the idea to become an actor. However, when I went to the New York Film Academy for acting one summer, I discovered that I desperately disliked being in front of the camera. I wanted to be the person that controls the narrative and tells the story, which was what led me down the filmmaking path.
Parody spent the first 19 years of her life growing up in Bogota, Colombia. After being accepted by the Tisch School of the Arts, she decided to pursue a career in the film industry. Parody credited her time at Tisch with allowing her to unlock her creativity as an artist, because she was encouraged to explore every aspect of the film production process and found a supportive community in the industry.
In 2016, Parody released “Rosa,” her NYU thesis film that she wrote and directed, after graduating from the university the year before. The short film received significant attention — it won a King Award and was a finalist at the NBCUniversal Shorts Festival.
WSN: How did ‘Rosa’ change the trajectory of your career?
Parody: Creative industries, particularly the film industry, are very much a feast-or-famine kind of model. You’re either killing it or raking it under existential threat. That having won the King Award just put me on this very early momentum of ‘feast.’ Something I’ve learned in my career is that when you have those wins in the entertainment industry, you don’t wait five minutes and see what’s going to happen. You have to take that right away, because the doors open as quickly as they close. So the success of ‘Rosa’ led me to meet a bunch of people that I still work with to this day. Actually, my most recent creative collaborator is a Tisch graduate who went to undergrad with me. His name is Ben Sottak, and we just released a short film together called ‘Hammer’ that we both co-wrote and co-directed.
The film’s success led Parody to meet Daniel Solé, who won the Best Writer Award at the NBCUniversal Shorts Festival that year. The two of them decided to collaborate, resulting in the critically acclaimed film “Gets Good Light.” The 2020 film, which follows an immigrant family, was screened at several film festivals and received nominations for the NAACP Image Awards and selected to screen at the Tribeca Film Festival.
In 2022, Parody started a two-year MBA program at the Stern School of Business after the film industry was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. After graduating from Stern, Parody moved to Los Angeles and started her full-time job at Deloitte, focusing on advising and consulting for technology, media and entertainment companies.
WSN: Why did you decide to switch paths and pursue business?
Parody: I actually have no idea what this industry is going to look like, and I am so excited to be in a position where I am hoping to set that future, rather than just reacting to it at the back of a line. I was seeing everything in the film industry as disrupted, so I started to have those conversations with myself where I realized I’m not doing what I wanted to do and what I said I was going to do, which is to use my talents to have the best, deepest positive impact in the world around me. Especially after COVID, I realized I hate being in this position of having to react to what is happening around me. I like to be proactive. So again, I thought, ‘Well, this industry is changing. Everything is insane. How do I get ahead of that?’ It seemed like the locus of action and agency is these companies, and specifically the strategy arm of these companies. So I got very curious about that and now I have an MBA.
Looking ahead, Parody said that she wants to further explore her identity as a Latin American through her work and make more Latin-inspired horror and sci-fi movies. She also said that she recently submitted “Martillo,” the feature film she co-directed with Sottak — which follows a Colombian woman accused of being a 17th-century witch — to a few festivals. Many of her other projects, including “Gets Good Light” and her 2023 short film “Neon Rage,” similarly portray strong female protagonists.
WSN: What inspires you to showcase strong women protagonists in your work?
Parody: I enjoy making films with strong women characters for two reasons. One, I see less of them on the screen, so that’s just naturally going to be more interesting to me. I always believe that the grass is greener on the other side of whatever I’m not seeing, and that’s what I want to be doing. Second, I have more experience being a woman than a man. It’s no secret that fiction is many times a metaphor for what we’re going through in our own lives. With strong female characters, it’s often either what I wish I did in that situation or what I would like to think I would do.
Contact Lekhya Kantheti at [email protected].
