A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Maria Valdez is a Guatemalan-born, California-raised, award-winning director. Her passion is bringing human interest stories to life from the Latino perspective and amplifying authentic portrayals of Latina characters. She has applied her style to almost every genre, ranging from comedy and drama to action. The unifying thread that stitches her stories together is the celebration of family, culture, and the embodiment of strong Latino characters. Maria was selected for the Alliance of Women's Directors/Latina Directing Fellowship, the Women in Film Directing Fellowship, and Unlock Her Potential Mentorship Program. Maria is also a graduate of the UCLA Film School, where she received her MFA in the Writing/Directing program.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.