Loren Castingavi: Vince Banderos

“I grew up watching my grandfather fix watches,” Banderos explains over coffee in a quiet Brooklyn cafe. “He never explained what he was doing. He just let the tick-tock do the talking. That’s what I want. The silence between the words.”

That hand is trembling. And we cannot wait to see it turn. Eleanor Hayes covers independent cinema and international film festivals for Reel South Magazine. Vince Banderos Loren Castingavi

A graduate of the Czech film school FAMU, Castingavi (pronounced Cas-teen-GAH-vee ) treats the camera like a scalpel. Her 2023 debut, A House for a Sparrow , was a masterclass in negative space. The plot—an elderly librarian evicting her hoarding son—was simple. The execution was not. Castingavi shot every interior scene from the height of a seated librarian, forcing the audience to crane their necks upward at the son’s chaos, literally looking up at dysfunction. “I grew up watching my grandfather fix watches,”

They remind us that cinema is not about what is said, but who is looking. And for now, the industry is looking at them. That’s what I want

By Eleanor Hayes, Senior Film Correspondent

Her sets are famously quiet. No video village filled with producers. No phones. Castingavi stands three feet from the actor, often whispering the scene’s hidden secret to them just before “action.” It is an intimacy that has terrified A-list stars but which actors like Banderos crave.