Cambria Matlow is a filmmaker – screenwriter, director, editor – who builds moody storyworlds that disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed, always asking: ‘Where is the violence that disrupts our humanity from thriving?’
Together with her Ecuadorian older half sister, she was raised in a Jewish middle-class household on Los Angeles’ westside. Since 2010 she’s lived in Portland OR, where she became a mother.
Matlow feels most alive when outside in nature. She’s inspired by intersections between the personal and political, matriarchy, rituals and witches, radical environmentalism, community care, performance, small gestures, and liminal spaces.
She believes in the revolutionary act of telling the truth in all its moral complexities and emotional contradictions, that these are the points from which rich story emerges. Yet she’s always in search of the whole human that society has forced into fragments for its own convenience.
Her narrative debut WHY DIG WHEN YOU CAN PLUCK premiered in competition at BAFICI in Argentina, won Best Pacific Northwest Feature at Tacoma Film Festival and earned Best Feature Film and Best Cinematography nominations from NewFilmmakers LA. Willamette Week declared the project among the ‘Top 25 Oregon Movies of the Past 25 Years.’
Her Jury and Audience award-winning documentaries NO MORE DOPE PARTIES, WOODSRIDER and BURNING IN THE SUN earned IFP Documentary Lab, Independent Film Week and Southern Circuit Tour selections, broadcast deals with Al Jazeera and PBS, and screenings in cinemas and festivals worldwide including New York’s Lincoln Center, Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival, and Portland Art Museum.
TEN THOUSAND TINY STARS — her Neo-Western/Coming-of-age currently in development – won Oregon Film/Playa’s inaugural Screenwriting Award and a fellowship nomination from Stowe Story Labs. At UC Riversides’s Palm Desert MFA Program in Creative Writing, Matlow received the Omni Award for screenwriting excellence.
Matlow’s films have been described as “hauntingly beautiful” and “patiently devastating” by Willamette Week and ”relaxing and contemplative” by the Los Angeles Times. BAFICI proclaims: “Matlow dares to whisper storms.”
She lives in SE Portland’s with her husband, teenaged son, and pitbull Vida.
NewFilmmakers LA Interview — on her narrative debut Why Dig When You Can Pluck and thoughts on filmmaking.