The Poet and the Filmmaker

Gabriela Garcia Medina’s journey from spoken word poet to award-winning filmmaker began with someone seeing her potential. Witness how belief can transform paths.

Long before Gabriela Garcia Medina became a filmmaker whose work premieres on HBO and inspires audiences worldwide, she was a young poet performing on a small Silverlake stage. I watched her that day, and in her words, her presence, her raw, untamed talent, I saw a spark I couldn’t ignore. I approached her afterward, and left with the inner knowing that we would work together someday.

I hadn’t realized then how far that simple act of belief could travel. A phone call, a collaboration, a shared vision. These small gestures became a turning point. Today, seeing Gabriela thrive as a filmmaker, I feel the quiet, extraordinary joy of proof: showing up fully, with heart and trust, can ignite someone else’s light. And in doing so, it fulfills a purpose far larger than yourself.

Years ago, I invited a spoken word poet into a small, no-budget commercial, and somewhere between a borrowed camera and a poem about self-love, a future film director was born.

Some beginnings disguise themselves as ordinary days.

That evening in Silver Lake, at an International Women’s Day gathering hosted by Self Help Graphics & Art, I watched a young Cuban poet step onto the stage and hold the space with nothing but her voice.

She performed a poem.
And I remember thinking, There she is.

Not polished. Not packaged. Raw.
A presence shaped by migration, memory, and fire.

Afterward, I introduced myself. We exchanged numbers. No grand strategy. Just instinct. The quiet certainty that our paths would cross again when the time was right.

Months later, they did.

At the time, I had entered a filmmaking challenge sponsored by Dove, owned by Unilever. The prize was a 30-second commercial set to premiere during the Academy Awards. Winning an Oscar had lived on my dream list for as long as I could remember. So when the opportunity appeared, I said let's frickin' go!
I’m grateful I eventually outgrew that version of myself.

I didn’t have a production budget. I didn’t have a built-in crew. What I had was conviction.

And an idea.

I called Gabriela.

She was on a spoken word tour in Miami. I asked if she would fly back to Los Angeles for the shoot. She said yes, if we could make it work. A buddy pass surfaced. A poem was written and rewritten together. To honor the contest rules, our words had to capture both the ethereal breath of cherry blossoms and the lingering comfort of the moisture on your skin. Gabriela made one request: she would not say the brand name in her poem. Her integrity mattered.

It mattered to me, too.

So in the outro, I decided I would let the name of the brand slip through a whisper—a soft, feminine secret shared only at the end.

I reached out to Matthew J. Siegel, the cinematographer from my first 35mm short, Mama Said. I also tapped a new acquaintance, composer Edwin Wendler, and was fortunate to get my friend Jessica Simmons on board to help push the 30-second spot across the finish line on time. Then, we did something bold.

Matt and I approached Panavision.
No budget. Two weeks. A national competition.

I thought if this was going to premiere alongside the Academy Awards, it needed cinematic weight. I wasn’t willing to compromise on that.

Panavision agreed, with one condition. We could use their newest camera package if we filmed inside a prep room at the headquarters.

The space was barely wide enough for a full dolly track.

So I adapted. Two-foot lateral sweeps. Close framings. Movement broken into fragments and stitched together in the edit. Constraint sharpened our creativity. Limitation became language. The result felt intimate and luminous. A group of artists, moving with purpose.

Feeling Divine was named one of three finalists.

We did not win.

The prize went to a young woman who’d filmed herself using the product in the shower on a low-grade digital camera. It was simple, literal, and unvarnished.

I was confused and completely bummed out. We created something meaningful and empowering, and within the guidelines, using nothing but our raw talent and generous access to quality tools.

I had done everything “right.” The production value. The message. The care. I believed we had delivered something worthy of an Academy Award broadcast, especially in how we honored Latina identity at a time when that visibility was rare in commercial campaigns.

My mother tried to console me. “Maybe they thought you were already a working director. Maybe it was too polished.”

Perhaps.
Still, it felt like a closed door.

Mom’s instinct was probably spot on. The perceived polish was likely misinterpreted as the work of an established director, which is the opposite of what this opportunity was geared toward, yet exactly why I entered the contest in the first place.

For me, a polished finish was the whole point.

Apparently, the marketing team at Dove was hunting for that “user-generated” look. If only I’d known that ahead of time.

Alas, this would become the story of my life. People often assume I don’t need help because I bring a high level of finish to my work, even when I’m just starting out. But believe me, I can use as much support as the next person.

Recently, while preparing to share that commercial, I searched for Gabriela online.

There she was.

An award-winning filmmaker. Graduate of California Institute of the Arts. Her films distributed by HBO. Developing projects with Mandalay Pictures. Previously partnered with Nuyorican Productions, and at one point set up at Netflix.

In the interview I listened to, she spoke about feeling alienated as one of few Latinas in the theater department at University of California, Los Angeles. About studying Chicano and African American history to deepen her art. About holding herself to high standards so no one could mistake lack of resources for lack of talent. This is every Latina's story in the arts.

She spoke about color, wanting her films to feel like a starburst in your mouth. About honoring her crew with thoughtful credit sequences so audiences stay and read every name. About telling joyful, vibrant stories instead of limiting Latina narratives to trauma.

And in her earlier interview about our commercial (featured above), she described that experience as nurturing. Magical. A collective of people coming together to create something beautiful. She said she hoped to manifest that kind of filmmaking environment again one day.

She did.
She stepped behind the camera herself.

There are seasons when it feels as though you missed something meant for you.

When the opportunity goes elsewhere.
When effort appears overlooked.
When your standards feel like the reason you lost.

And then there is the boomerang.

What is offered in sincerity often circles back in ways no award can measure.

I did not win that competition. Instead, I helped cultivate an environment where a young poet could experience filmmaking as possibility, not distance. Where her words were treated with respect. Where the process itself felt expansive.

Years later, she leads sets of her own.
That realization carries more weight than a trophy ever could.

Because this is the work beneath the work.

Women making space for women.
Latinas widening the lens.
Art moving forward through shared opportunity.

Back in Silver Lake, I saw her raw talent and trusted the instinct to say hola.

As I move along my creative journey, I do so with the same intention I set out with when I founded my first film production — to build crews that nurture emerging female talent, to invite young artists into rooms that might otherwise feel closed, to pursue my vision while helping others begin theirs.

If there are more Gabrielas waiting in small rooms with big voices, I will see their love-filled spirit and help them discover what’s possible.

The boomerang is still in motion.