James Garcia Sotomayor

James Garcia Sotomayor was born in Ecuador - a country with almost no film industry - and has come a long way from his very humble beginnings. He earned a degree in Electronic Engineering, although his dream has always been making movies, but there were no schools teaching filmmaking in Ecuador. James arrived to USA in 1998 to study CGI and 3D animation at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. In 2000, he relocated to Los Angeles where he worked as a Video Editor. In 2003, he moved to New York where he became a Video Engineer at Viacom, MTV Networks. During that year he decided to follow his vocation and started his self-education on film, working on friends' projects and directing/producing his own short films. In 2009, he co-wrote, directed and produced the very successful short film 'Taught to Hate', which was inspired by hate crimes against two Ecuadoreans in New York. The film won the prestigious Imagen Awards to Best Short film in 2010. James' biggest influences are the Italian Neo-realism and Charles Dickens. Among his favorite directors are Pedro Almodovar, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, Martin Scorsese and Guillermo Del Toro