Kimberly Forero-Arnías

Kimberly Forero-Arnías(she/ella) is white, US-born artist with a vibrant Colombia heritage. Her work has screened across the United States at festivals including Flex Fest, Ann Arbor, Chicago Underground, and Black Maria, as well as internationally at Rotterdam, Images Festival and the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She is the recipient of various awards including the SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and the Film Studies Center Fellowship at Harvard. She currently lives and works in Boston, MA on the colonized Wôpanâak (Wampanoag) and Massachusett Tribe land. 

This interview was conducted by Ifunanya (Indigio) Obi in April, 2025 Boston MA

I.O.  How did you discover your interest in filmmaking? Did you ever want to do anything else? 

K.F.A  So yeah, when I was in high school, I thought I was going to go to college to be a biologist or chemist, something in the sciences. But then a friend of mine went to a summer class at Pratt for photography and she came back and was really excited to start her own darkroom in her basement. I helped her setup the equipment and started learning from her, learning how to develop photos, take photos. I borrowed a camera from my uncle who was our family photographer. And when she applied to art schools I also applied. I didn't understand or really know what art school was and I just applied with her and to my surprise I got in and sort of decided to just go for it. 

 I.O.  Do you describe yourself as a feminist filmmaker? What does feminist filmmaking mean to you? 

K.F.A.  I think that that's an interesting question. I don't really describe my work that way though I do think it enacts a type of feminist thinking. I think I hesitate to describe my work that way because while I do read a lot of texts and I am not an academic who follows the ways that language and theories change or shift and since I don’t keep up with that I worry rather than accurately describing my work it’ll end up being some more superficial. So I'll give you an example. I think something like intersectional feminism resonates a bit more with me. I think a lot about the various positions that I occupy and how they all inform my way of working and seeing. And so I can add the word intersectional in front of feminism, and I feel like it resonates with me right now. But I imagine there's probably a lot of other words that I could add in front of the word feminism and maybe they're more specific, more precise or feel like they resonate better. But I'm not sure that getting that language right is something I'm overly preoccupied with for better or for worse.   

I.O.  Would you describe yourself as an experimental filmmaker?  How do you define experimental filmmaking? 

K.F.A.  I do define myself as an experimental filmmaker. I also describe myself as an experimental animator. I've gone back and forth over the years with those two terms. Similar to the word feminism, I'm not sure experimental is the right word either but I guess reflecting on it, I've never been happy with the language that I used to describe my work. I also feel I’m missing something, they’ve all been really bad, poor attempts. I don't think I'm particularly good with language and it's a lot of work for me to land on something that feels accurate and at a certain point I just need to move on. Experimental feels like a useful word to throw into the mix because I appreciate that the genres allows me to create work without any kind of expectation on what the form actually is, which I appreciate. 

I.O.  What is your filmmaking process? 

K.F.A.  My filmmaking process is different every time I make a film. And it's changed a lot over time. At one point I was really interested in optical printers and the oxberry. Then I just wanted to stick to drawing on paper for an entire film.  My last film, recortes, I was mixing a variety of curiosities for materials. One thing that seems consistent is that it’s always nonlinear and messy. I tend to generate a lot of material to then parse through, edit, remove, redo... I usually have like 80 versions of a cut and it's not minor edits here or there. It's like totally reconfiguring the material. So I tend to produce a lot of different things and then step back.   

I.O.  Where do your ideas for your films come from, for example, Dos Corrientes? 

K.F.A.  My ideas come from a lot of different places but that particular film, I have two cousins who were getting married and having destination wedding, one at Disney in California and another in Cabo,Mexico. Locations were really important for me in that film because I was thinking a lot about my relationship to my family and my “colombianess”, feeling a bit like a tourist in my own identity. So those locations seemed like really great spots to film because of their relationship to a type of tourism heavily engaged in fantasy.  Like, I never say I’ve been to Mexico even though I’ve been to Cabo because I was basically in a resort that literally had walls dividing the community and the tourists, inviting in those living nearby soley as workers. And I think it's pretty clear how that operates in Disney. So I just decided to film at both of these places to think through parts of my identity. 

I.O.  When you create films, is there a specific demographic you wish to cater to? 

K.F.A. When I went to art school, like I said, I didn't really understand what art school was, and I signed up for a film class because a friend had told me to take a film class over a video class, but I didn't understand what the differences were between the two. When it took my first film class we were watching a lot of experimental films and I didn't understand how to join the conversation, I didn't connect with them. I felt like I had a lot that I had to learn to be able to understand what was happening in a way that other folks in my class didn't seem to need to do. One day when the professor, the instructor, who was Ben Russell, played a film that had someone speaking in Spanish. I honestly cannot remember what film it was but as it was playing it was like something opened up, it made me feel like I could contribute. I hadn't even realized that part of why I felt so lost was because I wasn’t including my whole self in the conversation, I thought I had to learn something else outside me to contribue and then such a small gesture, hearing someone speak Spanish in an experimental film, allowed me to understand that I coud bring this other part of myself into this space was quite profound. And I think with my films I am just trying to dig deep into my experiences to make space for the nuances that might make others feel welcome to share and connect with others. 

I.O.  How has being a Latinx filmmaker influenced you and your work? 

K.F.A  I think for a long time in my work it was kind of a preoccupation, something I kind of couldn't stop thinking about. That's been lessening though. I think I'm starting to move from it being the subject of my work to being something that informs my work but we’ll see. I think there is also something generative about flipping the question, “How has your work influenced you being Latina”? Maybe that's a silly rephrasing, but the reason I say that is because I think my work has allowed me to feel more comfortable, more able to authentically express my latina identity, with all of the nuance and contradictions and frictions that come with it. 

I.O.  What do you hope to see in the future regarding feminist films and filmmakers? 

K.F.A.  I'm not sure except I want more nuanced inclusivity.    

I.O.  What advice can you give to other women in filmmaking? 

K.F.A. I think for a long time I adopted practices and processes that I felt I needed to adapt into and more recently, I've been feeling like I can adapt my processes and practices to work for me. And perhaps that also works beyond filmmaking practices too.