Film takes RKA grad to Cannes

Independent filmmaker David Diaz, born and raised in the Bronx, has always been obsessed with movies. When he was little, he started recording his favorite films off his television on his VCR; he still has over 100 of them on VHS. Then when he was 16, he and a friend had a skit comedy show on a local public access channel.

Mr. Diaz, 33, went to the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy (RKA, M.S./H.S. 141) and John F. Kennedy High School, before the latter institution was divided into smaller schools.

He partly credits his interest in filmmaking to a class he took at JFK.

“There was one class I got on a whim, because in high school you can’t really pick your classes. It was a horror film class, like I remember we read ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and then we watched it and we did a whole bunch of other film analysis on other films,” he explained. “And there I started really liking the whole film thing.”

Mr. Diaz liked the whole film thing so much, he went to Bronx Community College to study it, and then got his BFA in film at Hunter College. He has been making short films and documentaries ever since.

This year, his short film “El Hijo Solo” (“The Only Son”) was accepted to the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in the south of France. Mr. Diaz used a crowd-funding campaign on Indiegogo to raise money for his trip and set off in May.

“It was overwhelming. I can’t put it into words, really,” he said. “I’m here watching a movie on the beach while a club is playing Biggie in France, which is pretty awesome.”

Mr. Diaz thinks he was the only Bronxite at the festival, although he did run into a fellow Hunter College graduate. And he is proud of his heritage.

“I always say I’m from the Bronx wherever I go,” he said. “I take pride in it.”

“El Hijo Solo,” is about a sheltered young man in Argentina whose mother dies, leaving him to live with his aunt in the big city of Buenos Aires. The aunt runs an Alcoholics Anonymous group, and the story centers around the people the young man meets there.