Monica Mendoza de Vaina Buena Productions
Mónica Mendoza, director and founder of Vaina Buena Productions, presents her documentary series Historias del Closet: Israel in Miami. The producers are Vaina Buena Productions and Fuente Latina. The documentary is bilingual with subtitles.
Mendoza, a Colombian-American journalist and documentary filmmaker living in Miami for more than 20 years, already has a documentary titled El Despertar de las Hadas about women and their self-esteem.
Her inspiration for Historias del Closet arose after her experience directing the documentary El Despertar de las Hadas. “I wanted to tell stories about how people in the LGBTQ+ community have experienced their coming out process, hoping these narratives could support young people going through that stage. Although the circumstances were not right at that time for the project, everything changed when Fuente Latina offered me the opportunity to travel to Israel to explore a different aspect of a country known for its challenges and complexities. Coincidentally, the trip was scheduled during Pride Week in Tel Aviv, so it was like all the pieces finally fell into place,” Mendoza said.
For Mendoza, a documentary like Historias del Closet becomes a fundamental tool due to a lack of understanding and misinformation about the LGBTQ+ community. “Making this type of documentary allows the voices of people belonging to this community to finally be heard, which is essential for encouraging empathy and understanding. By offering a platform to share their life stories, struggles, and successes, we have the opportunity to humanize the people who make up this community and counteract the harmful stereotypes that often prevail.”
Filming the four interviews making up the documentary took a single day, and during the parade, we took the supporting images. “Because we were in a hotel right on Pride Road, some of the interviewees could not arrive on time, so the stress was great, but everything was solved; we got what we wanted,” she says.
Mendoza said the documentary already caught the attention of a platform in the US Hispanic market and added she is willing to film other similar documentaries showing similar stories in different countries such as Mexico, Ecuador, and the US.
