Person Biography:
Mario Nunez, a founding member of the Independent Feature Project, is a renowned film director known for his low-budget, non-Hollywood projects that often take years to come to fruition. Born in Peru and raised in Tallahassee, Florida, Nunez completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in film, before working on educational and industrial shorts.
Nunez's early career was marked by the creation of three fictional shorts in the 1970s, including "Taking Care of Mother Baldwin" (1970),"Charly Benson's Return to the Sea" (1972),and "A Circle in the Fire" (1974),which was adapted from a Flannery O'Connor story.
In 1979, Nunez made his feature debut with "Gal Young Un", a low-budget drama set in the 1920s, based on the story of the same name by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The film tells the story of a widowed Florida woman, her bootlegger second husband, and his mistress, the title character.
Six years later, Nunez completed "A Flash of Green" (1984),his first feature to employ big-name actors, starring Ed Harris, Blair Brown, and Richard Jordan. The film was adapted from a John D. MacDonald novel and is a fine, offbeat story of a reporter investigating a suspect landfill development deal in a small Florida coastal town.
After nearly a decade of unsuccessful Hollywood pitch meetings, Nunez financed his third film, "Ruby in Paradise" (1993),using an inheritance of $400,000. The film presents his touching tale of a young girl's journey of self-discovery from the back roads of Tennessee to Florida. Like Nunez's previous films, "Ruby in Paradise" was a hit on the festival circuit, and star Ashley Judd was touted as a promising newcomer. The film's look also received praise, with Nunez serving as his own cameraman and shooting the film in Super-16 for a grainy, muted effect.
Nunez followed "Ruby" with two more films set in the Florida panhandle, "Ulee's Gold" (1997) and "Coastlines" (2002).
