SHORT BIO
Writer/director Cambria Matlow builds moody storyworlds that disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. A second-generation Jewess raised in Los Angeles together with her Ecuadorian sister, since 2010 Matlow’s lived in Portland Oregon, where she became a mother. After fifteen years crafting award-winning documentaries, Matlow’s narrative debut WHY DIG WHEN YOU CAN PLUCK premiered in competition at BAFICI, won Best Pacific Northwest Feature at Tacoma Film Festival, and earned Best Feature and Best Cinematography nominations from NewFilmmakers LA. Willamette Week declared the project among the ‘Top 25 Oregon Movies of the Past 25 Years,’ placing Matlow alongside her hero, renown auteur Kelly Reichardt. Her latest narrative project, a Western, is currently in development.
THE DETAILS
Matlow is a filmmaker – screenwriter, director, editor – always asking: ‘Where is the violence, from without and within, that disrupts our humanity from thriving?’
She’s inspired by intersections between the personal and political, ancestry, matriarchy and witches, erotic nature, radical activism, community care, performance, small gestures, and liminal spaces. A longtime snowboarder and hiker, Matlow feels most alive and grounded when in the outdoors.
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’s broken systems have forced into fragments. Her storytelling reclaims a collective and personal sense of belonging.
TEN THOUSAND TINY STARS — her Neo-Western/Coming-of-age currently in development — won Oregon Film/Playa’s inaugural Screenwriting Award, participated in Stowe Stories Labs’ Narrative Lab, and was nominated for their Law Firm of Stacey A. Davis Fellowship. At UC Riversides’s Palm Desert MFA Program in Creative Writing, Matlow received the Omni Award for screenwriting excellence.
Her Jury and Audience award-winning documentaries NO MORE DOPE PARTIES, WOODSRIDER and BURNING IN THE SUN collectively earned IFP (now The Gotham) Documentary Lab, Independent Film Week and Southern Circuit Tour selections, broadcast deals with Al Jazeera and PBS, and screenings in over sixty cinemas and festivals worldwide including New York’s Lincoln Center, Santa Barbara Int’l Film Festival, and Portland Art Museum.
Matlow and her work have received additional support from Creative Capital, Northwest Documentary, Signal Fire, Sou’wester, In Cahoots, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Film, Puffin Foundation, Experimental Television Center, LEF Foundation, and Brooklyn Arts Council.
Her 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 Lents neighborhood 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.