Natural Born Storyteller

Irony can be an effective device in filmmaking, and that isn’t lost on Amanda Gotera ’09. The University of Texas MFA student’s film future was recently recognized by the Princess Grace Foundation-USA, yet Gotera’s films are anything but glamorous fairy tales, and her characters are more fiercely fearless than pretty-in-pink.

Gotera, who says she’s always been “driven by stories and story-telling,” studied creative writing and anthropology at Grinnell “to tell stories in cultural contexts.” Grinnell’s film studies curriculum was under development when Gotera was a student so the closest she came to film was creating audio documentaries for KDIC.

After Grinnell, she worked as a children’s librarian which she enjoyed “as an immersion into media of all types — audiobooks, games, films. I watched a lot of popular media for the first time outside of academia and got interested in making films myself.” She applied to graduate programs in creative writing and film, and even though she had no experience, she was excited about the writing side of film production. 

Now she’s using her training in alternative ethnographies to tell stories through the small Texas film program that Gotera says reminds her of Grinnell. “It’s a collaborative, small community interested in social responsibility. In a small program like this, you come to know every side of filmmaking. I’ve found that I really love directing and the process of scriptwriting but I also love building props and costumes and am especially drawn to visual effects and animation.” 

Gotera describes films as “huge artistic endeavors” and filmmaking as a “very expensive art form.” Her 17-minute thesis film, Middle Witch, still in development, had an initial budget of $67,000. But by including available talent, labor and materials from the MFA program, she was able to reduce the cost to $14,000, now funded by her recent Princess Grace Award, a tribute to the late Grace Kelly of Hollywood fame. 

“Funding through the award means that I can now think more about the story and less about the budget,” Gotera says with relief. “I’ve always been interested in the fantastical and magical, and that’s hard to do on a budget. Now I can be more creative.

“Alot of what drives my stories is there’s never enough about girlhood that speaks to that experience. There are countless films that celebrate men and boys. I want to adjust film to focus on girls and portray accessible women in powerful roles.”

Gotera describes her upcoming Middle Witch as “a contemporary folktale about the relationship between three adolescent sisters,” while two previous projects, Launch Sequence and Ronnie Monsters, explored girlhood through science fiction.

The timeline for Middle Witch calls for pre-production before year-end and production next spring. “I’ll have a finished product to submit to film festivals to get the attention of production companies. I will try to find work in design and animation, and I eventually want to write and direct.”

As she talks animatedly about her future, she also regards her past. “Going into film has everything to do with being able to take part in lots of things, much like my experience at Grinnell, where I embarked on entirely new things — identity politics; sense of place; ecology; telling stories.

“The breadth of my Grinnell experience is why I am able to adapt and move quickly in this business,” Gotera relates. “If I had talked to first-year Amanda, she wouldn’t see herself where I am today.” Perhaps in an upcoming feature film? The irony isn’t lost on the storyteller.