By Nick Smith
It’s commonly accepted that to make movies, you have to go to Los Angeles or New York. Atlanta is a hotbed of production right now, with TV shows like The Walking Dead and movies like Avengers: Endgame filming there. Pace, Florida is not a hotbed. But that is where Afro-Latino director Julio Vargas has chosen to call home.
Julio Vargas is friendly and helpful, the kind of guy you want on your side. He’s a responsible family man who always has a story to tell and loves making movies. His short, dystopian science fiction film All Boys Die is a hit on the film festival circuit, recently winning two awards at the Kite Film Festival in Destin and selected to screen at Pensacon. His other new film They Only See Our Faces will be playing in Dunedin International Film Festival and in the Oregon Coast Film Festival.
He was born in New York and grew up in East Boston by the airport. “At the time,” he says, “it was a predominantly Italian neighborhood transforming into a Latino neighborhood. There were some problems but the pasta was good.” Vargas partly attributes his tenacity to that upbringing. “I think Boston has a working-class grit to it. You combine that with the weather and there’s something hardnosed about life there. That’s how I am, I will work my way until it’s done no matter what.”
Julio was young when he found his path in life. “As a kid I watched a lot of films,” he says, “more than I should have, I had access to horror when I was eight, HBO, Cinemax. Mom didn’t know.” As a teen Vargas experimented with music, art and public access TV. He had his own show while in high school and felt he could do better than the producers. That led to a serious interest in making movies.
By the time he was 30, Vargas had been an educator teaching kids in an aquarium for seven years. “I was offered a nice promotion,” Vargas recalls, “a nice office. I knew if I took it, that would be it.” He would be locked into that career. He quit and shot a documentary on the border, The Wall That Binds Us, which won a Directors Guild of America Student Award.
Vargas became a professional filmmaker, working in LA with companies like Univision. But he chose to hone his skills in Film Production at FSU, earning a Master’s Degree and teaching screenwriters in Tallahassee. Sojourns in Pace give him a break from the relentless hurly-burly of filmmaking. Even there he works on scripts and is committed to making films on the Gulf Coast.
“I’m working on a couple of things with one of my former classmates,” says Vargas, “including a web series. It’s a cool idea we should work on. Everyone’s getting excited.” He is particularly interested in depicting his own Dominican-American experience. “Not enough is told from that perspective,” he says. While he never denies his heritage, Vargas doesn’t want to be pigeonholed either. “I don’t care what you call me. I’ll make noise.”
Vargas is living proof that no matter where you live, where you’re from, or how you’re labeled, if you’re determined enough, you will achieve your goals. “People can say what they like, filmmaking is my identity, what I am, and I’ll never stop. I’m not changing my path for nothing.”
