Bio
Randy crafts films that are philosophical, challenging, and that inspire the viewer to be introspective. His background as a Director of Photography is an essential part of his work as a Director, using cinematography to cultivate an atmosphere in his films that is powerful and purposeful. He's been fortunate to premiere work at The Sheffield International Documentary Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, and SXSW FilmFest, and has been screened at Hot Docs – Film and Music Series, New York Latino Film Festival, San Francisco Latino Film Festival, ScreenDance Miami, and won best feature documentary at XicanIndie FilmFest. His first short film was acquired by HBO for national distribution and his second, Petra, won the Audience Award in the Miami Film Festival where it premiered and was signed for international distribution with 7 Palms Entertainment.
Although a film Director first, Randy has developed a multidisciplinary career. His work includes photography which allows him to capture simply how he sees the world. He works with collages, sometimes animated, which focus on spiritual elements from an analytical psychology angle. Through the body of his work, Randy strives to serve the greatest of all arts, the Art of Living, by pushing the modern being toward the pursuit of wisdom.
Randy Valdes
WRITER ⎪ DIRECTOR ⎪CINEMATOGRAPER
Artist Statement
The intent is for my body of work to aim the viewer toward psychic harmony, balance, equilibrium, samādhi. These are names for the unification of all aspects of our being, the condition necessary for the cessation of suffering and sorrow, and the realization of wholeness, satisfaction, liberation, and peace. To achieve such goal there are no other paths than those that cultivate wisdom, and the act of creating is how I seek it.
Art allows us the benefit of dreaming even while we’re awake, and this process unearths content from the depths of our minds and reveals it to our conscious thoughts, instigating inner adaptation. By inner adaptation I mean how well we can bring all our competing desires, tendencies, impulses and urges to a harmonious state so they all work in unison toward a single goal instead of competing and offsetting each other, and causing unintended collateral damage to our overall psychological and physiological state. Expanding consciousness is essential to the advancement of our inner adaptation, shining the light of awareness over all the mental processes working in the dark gives us a great deal of influential power over our own states. Without inner adaptation there is little chance of successful outer adaptation for a Human being, which is the condition necessary for any organism to thrive in its environment, and for the continual expression of Life- Life being the Universe’s most complex manifestation of Itself. It’s clear then, to me, that my art needs to serve the process we know as dreaming and as such be true to an ideal I hold dear, as expressed by Hendrik Willem Van Loon, “All the Art should have but one single purpose, and should contribute as much as it is within their own particular power to do so to the highest of all the Arts- the Art of Living.”
It isn’t clear to me why motion pictures is the medium I choose most readily. There is simply more comfort. But when I consider my comfort too with still photography and digital collage work, it’s evident that having technology as my brush is a natural inclination. This observation does bring me some initial discomfort because in terms of my personal views, I tend to see technology as the most-immediate threat to mankind’s potential for happiness. I do understand, however, that if natural selection had humans thriving in this epoch it must be accepted as good, and humans owe their success to their technological power. Thus the conclusion must be that technology itself, like all other forms of existence, is neither good or bad, it’s how we wield the power that determines its destructive or constructive potential. This and other contradictory ideas that I seek to understand with my writing are the ones that, through my comfort with technology and my appreciation for the power of storytelling, I bring to the screen: silver, white, or black.