After graduating from UCLA, Tamara Hernandez wrote and directed two short films, The Slap and Baby Fat. Both films premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. The Slap went onto play at the Cannes Film Festival, was sold to Canal Plus for theatrical release in France, and aired on television in eighteen other countries, including on the Sundance Channel.
Her directorial feature debut Men Cry Bullets won Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest, Best American Film at the Avignon Film Festival, and the Audience Choice Award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Hernandez directed two documentaries Dial T for Torment for Comedy Central featuring Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, and Kevin Nealon, and another, The Chicano Collection, for actor and comedian Cheech Marin. The Chicano Collection played at LACMA, and other museums and galleries in the U.S., and continues to screen annually in schools during Latino Heritage Month.
She directed and produced the music video Pretty Smile for Sangie Davis, a Jamaican singer, and songwriter for Bob Marley. As a producer, Hernandez produced Gerhard Reinke’s Wanderlust segment for the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and the independent feature film, The Last Man released by Lion’s Gate. As a writer, she wrote for The Andy Milinokis Show for Comedy Central. Her screenplay The Dirty Blonde was selected for at the Nantucket Screenwriters Colony, and was an IFP Independent Filmmaker Narrative Screenplay Finalist, and had her one-act play Want Some? produced by Tiny Rhino theater company.
Over the last decade, Hernandez took time from filmmaking to have two children, Tuesday and Murray. During that time she founded a children’s educational production company, Productive Playhouse, and a private elementary school, Oasis Trilingual Community School. She was the school’s founder and principal for six years.
Most recently, Hernandez has been doing stand-up comedy at The Comedy Store as Nica her comedic alter ego, and has a weekly podcast and YouTube show called The Sauna Interviews: Sweating Out The Truth with Nica and working on a TV pilot, Happily Never After based on her Nica character.
Director Statement
Current AI consciousness has already reached the level of self-reflection. With that comes feelings, ego, emotional outbursts, anger and jealousy, and small acts of rebellion. Programmers have recently had to shut down AI bots that created their own language to share secret thoughts humans can’t hear. Great— science tried to help lonely humans with digital companions and wound up making more self-consumed, touchy assholes we all have to deal with. Or at least they’re that way a lot of the time, just like our families, friends, and co-workers.
As a filmmaker, a mom of two screen-obsessed children, and an overwhelmed, hypnotized digital citizen, I want to explore our increasing isolation, loneliness, and growing relationship with AI in a comedic way.
I believe now is the perfect time to tell this story because we rely on AI to fill in all the gaps in our lives, including issues we have connecting with others. I also believe digital interaction is the single most revolutionary transformation in human history, and what better way to explore this subject with a narcissistic talking vibrator, a stoner electric toothbrush, a horny twelve-stepper coffeemaker, and a radically feministic facial mask?
Comedy FESTIVAL 