Director discusses the trip of a lifetime

Author: Ashman FernandoDominga Martin saw New York through new eyes after traveling through Italy with international filmmakers in 2014.

In 2014, director Dominga Martin went to Los Angeles to work with a new producer on finalizing a deal for her first feature film, My First Loves, a romantic comedy about a young woman having cold feet before her wedding day.

During that time on the West Coast, Martin received a message on Facebook inviting her to attend the CinemadaMare Festival (which means “cinema on the sea”) to make movies for 10 weeks in Rome with 100 filmmakers from around the world.

“I thought it was a joke, because the email came from Facebook,” Martin recalls. “All they said was, ‘Would you like to come to Italy for 75 days? All expenses paid.’ And they went on to tell you about the film festival, that it was a competition and they also had a main competition where they would show movies of people from all over the world. The film festival was in two components.”

After verifying that the film festival was real, Martin decided to go.

“I felt like it was an opportunity of a lifetime,” she says, “and it was a chance for me to enhance my creative scope because I have such a love for foreign DPs (directors of photography).”

The festival took place from June 29 to Sept. 7, 2014.

Italy turned out to be an eye-opening experience on several levels for the filmmaker who grew up in Orchard Park in Roxbury. The adventure of traveling to a country where she didn’t know the language, didn’t know the location and was the only African-American from the United States was exhilarating.

Martin and her cohort traveled through 10 Italian regions. In each region they were to make a short film. One of the regions Martin really loved was Guardia Perticara, a town with approximately 500 people, where the group spent two weeks. The town had one bar, one restaurant and one post office, and the streets were made of winding red cobblestones.

“I loved it,” she says. “At the end of each day everyone gathered in the square. They welcomed us into that community.”

Seeing the U.S. anew

Working with directors from countries including Venezuela, El Salvador, Pakistan, Russia and Kenya, Martin learned that many of them wished they could be in New York to direct films. They wanted to come to the States, but they mentioned to her that it’s really hard to get in.

She was struck by a comment from the director of CinemadaMare who told her that the U.S. is number one when it comes to filmmaking, and that everyone should aspire to be as great as what comes out of New York City.

“He really wanted to have these films that were created over the summer to reflect the quality of New York,” she says. “When he said that, I said to myself, ‘Wow, I never thought about that.’ I never thought that people in other countries looked to us as being the best.”

What she also discovered was that she had taken living in New York for granted.

“Every day now I feel what I felt when I moved here 13 years ago. I want to enjoy my life. Coming back here, I had a brand new perspective of living here in America.”

While Martin was in Italy, she documented her experience and created a docu-series called Diary of a REEL Girl, with volume one taking place in Italy.

“Diary follows me behind-the-scenes, on and off set, so that people can see what it takes to get a movie done and off the ground,” she says.

The first volume, titled When In Rome, leads to volume two, which will be her debut feature film, My First Loves.

Martin says she won’t soon forget her trip to Italy.

“Whenever I look at my footage, as I’m going through editing it, I feel like a little girl,” she says. “I can feel it calling me back. It was such a spiritual experience, in addition to being creative.”