Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias

Born in Santo Domingo in 1985, Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias graduated with an MFA in Film/Video from the CalArts School of Art in 2014. He has directed four shorts and five features, including Cocote, which won the Golden Leopard in the Signs of Life category at the Locarno Film Festival. PEPE, his latest film, won the Silver Bear as Best Director at Berlinale 2024, making him the first Latin American to receive this honor.

Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias is developing a film around Monte Plata (Dominican Republic), where in 1973 the last peasant leader was killed defending the last free lands in this region, once the first brown territory in the Americas. Colonization was the virus that gave rise to today’s global inequality – a world shaped by the global North, building itself on the plunder of the global South. It’s not just a question of geographical divisions, but above all of mental ones. This cycle is repeated ad infinitum through global capitalism, which transforms liberated lands into extraction zones. Monte Plata, once a place of resistance, now feeds a Santo Domingo “à la Miami”, with racialized, underpaid workers trapped in a system that exploits their labor and erases their history.