Anthony Cortez Fernandez

Anthony Cortez Fernandez's first film was American Nightmare, a series of vignettes he created for the 1999 Showtime Pencil Youth Video Festival about his own high school in Flushing, Queens. The short, which placed second in the festival and got Fernandez kicked out of school and into filmmaking full time with $2,000 in prize money, exposed the atmosphere of raw fear, pressure and hopelessness students faced in the under-funded New York City public school.