Samuel is a Colombian-born filmmaker and educator based in Austin, USA.

Awards and Distinctions

  • Jackson Wild Media Awards Finalist (2024) — “Boca Chica”

  • Mesquite Jury Award (2024) - Cine Festival — “Floodplain”

  • Audience Award - Cine Las Americas- Hecho en Tejas’ (2024) “Floodplain”

  • National Geographic Field Ready Program (2023-2024)

  • Jackson Wild Media Lab Fellow (2023)

  • Best Cinematography (2023) - World Food Forum - “La Cosecha”

  • Austin Asian American Film Festival Documentary Jury (2023)

  • National Geographic Explorer (2022)

  • Silver Telly Award for Directing (2021) - “Remember Love”

  • “Our Heritage Our Planet” Hispanic Access Fellowship Grantee (2022)

  • “Every Body is a Camera: How to imagine Peace” TedxHanoi Speaker (2019)

Filmography

  • La Cosecha (Short Documentary, Director, Cinematographer, 12 min, 2023) 

    • SXSW | World Premiere | March 2023 

    • Dallas International Film Festival | April 2023

    • Cine Las Americas | June 2023

    • CineFestival | July 2023

    • Deep in the Heart Film Festival | July 2023

    • South Texas International Film Festival | September 2023 

    • New York Latino Film Festival | September 2023

    • El Paso Film Festival | September 2023

    • Viet Film Festival | October 2023

    • Seattle Latino Film Festival | October 2023

    • Seoul International Food Festival | October 2023

    • Ceres Food Film Festival | October 2023

  • Boca Chica (Short Documentary, Co-Director, Producer, 13 min, Post-Production)

    • Hot Springs International Film Festival | World Premiere | October 2023

    • New Orleans Film Festival | November 2023 

  • FLOODPLAIN (Short Documentary, Director, Cinematographer, Editor, 20 min, Post-Production)

  • La Concierge de Azule (Short Documentary, Director, Cinematographer, Editor, 9 min, Post-Production)

  • Untitled HEAT (Short Documentary, Director, Cinematographer, Editor, 15 min, Production)

    • Supported by the National Geographic Society 

  • Untitled Sargassum Project (Short Documentary, Co-Director, Producer, Pre-Production)

  • Little by Little (Narrative Series, Producer, XX min, 2021)

    • Cambodia International Film Festival

  • Year of the Rabbit (Short Documentary, Producer, 2021) 

  • New Spirits (Feature Documentary, Co-Director, 79 min, 2010)

I am captivated by film’s unique power to weave time, space, and bodies together—seemingly out of whole cloth. This is the magic trick.

The medium allows us to “sculpt in time”, as Tarkovsky once wrote. It is what makes our craft distinct. As filmmakers we have a responsibility to the way we shape, squeeze, and cut up Time, and as a result, how we establish an audience’s relationship to the past, memory, and its inverse—what is willfully forgotten.

Yet within this canvas, there is always, the promise of intimacy. Capturing something small that exudes warmth, care, and friction. This is what I love in film: the proximity of the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small.

In all my work, I pursue what is tender and soft—exposed and often unnamed—waiting to be seen, however ephemeral or fading, within each passing frame.

Samuel has produced and directed social impact and commercial pieces with The National Bank of Cambodia, The Asia Foundation, APEC, NALAC, Google Arts and Culture, Square, Pepsi- Buffalo Bills, UNDP, USAID and Visa Innovation Labs, amongst others.

In 2021, he received a Silver Telly for directing the short film, “Remember Love,” on the memories of children orphaned by the extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. Samuel was named a National Geographic Explorer in 2022 for his upcoming short doc on Thermal Inequities and Community perceptions of heat in Austin TX. This will comprise one part of his Austin trilogy—a series of shorts that focus on the lived experience of vulnerable communities in Austin around themes of heat, food access and flooding.

His films have been shown at Big Sky, New Orleans Film Festival, Hot Springs Film Festival, Austin Asian American Film Festival, Cambodia International Film Festival, Dallas International Film Festival, among others. His short documentary—”La Cosecha”—had its world premiere at the SXSW film festival in 2023.

He is also the co-founder of TÁPI Story and the School of Slow Media—a documentary filmmaking training program, based in Southeast Asia, that mixes filmmaking practices with somatic methodologies and a new awareness of the ethical demands of filmmaking.