Joe Nava
Joe Nava is a screenwriter, director, and playwright. He was born in Mexico City and seasoned through the years in Tokyo, Paris, and Madrid. He graduated from USC School of Cinema with a BA in Production. After working several years as an assistant in film and TV production, Joe has dedicated his life to writing and filmmaking. His screenplays Heart of August and Farewell to Paradise have been recognized by the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and the Nicholl Fellowship. Joe is a member of the theater collective Gunfighter Nation, with whom he co-wrote and produced the 12-hour radio serial In a Desert a Highway for CalArts. Currently, Joe is working on staging a production of his one act plays Brutus and Cathedral, as well as writing the feature version of Violeta.
Joe’s screenplays often eschew traditional 3-act structures in favor of episodic or experimental narrative designs. Visually, his screenplays evoke melodrama, although he tends to subvert the genre by mixing elements of the absurd and the grotesque – sometimes within a single image or character. His characters are usually victims of their own spiritual and carnal desires, and are driven to extremes as they seek, but not always find, redemption. Recently, Joe’s work explores what it means to be a Latin male displaced in an American city that is at once foreign and home. Some notable influences on Joe include Alfred Hitchcock, John Cassavetes, Pedro Almodovar, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, and Michael Haneke.
