Between Love and Pain — Filmmaker Daniela Riascos
Daniela
Riascos
Everything between love and pain — joy and woe. Colombian-born, NYU Tisch BFA, editorial producer and director in New York.
Colombian-born filmmaker Daniela Riascos on Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, making a gloriously bad film at Tisch, and why every dream project begins with a spark and ends somewhere far beyond the final cut.
Her visual identity reminds me of Floria Sigismondi — someone who always saw beauty in things others would find too dark, too macabre.
Daniela Riascos grew up in Colombia, studied Media Studies at Brown University, and went on to earn a BFA in Film & Television from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Since graduating, she has built a practice in editorial production and direction — working across international projects and New York campaigns for clients ranging from Juan Valdez to Colgate, managing creative teams, budgets and vision from brief to final cut.
Her sensibility is cinematic in the truest sense — shaped not by trends but by a canon of filmmakers who understood that the most unbearable feelings make the most unforgettable images.
Ultimately, everything between love and pain — joy and woe.
Daniela Riascos — on inspiration
Every project starts out as a dream, she says. It is spawned by the music you listen to, the people you meet, the places you visit. "These happenings provoke reflections and thoughts that inevitably — be it at the dentist's office, the subway or the editing studio — weave themselves into ideas worthy of intent."
You know it's a dream project when you witness those ideas become a reality at the hands of a talented team of people that you brought together. When, once completed, you look back and realize that it has been a product of ongoing inspiration — from that initial spark to the final cut, and beyond.
"The experience of making a bad film." That is her answer when asked about her most interesting film school experience. She describes it with the precision of someone who has fully digested the lesson: the winning idea, the hours of fine-tuning, the convinced cast and crew, the survival of the shoot — and then the moment of first viewing, when it hits.
"Your film is less than stellar. In fact, it's the antithesis of who you are as a filmmaker." She told her team she was still working on it. "Eventually, the fear of the fact that you might actually work on it forever is transformed into the driving force behind your next endeavor." The best film school story, because it is the only honest one.