While getting his master’s in media management at Fordham, Andrew Hevia, GABELLI ’15, earned a Fulbright fellowship to visit Hong Kong and make a documentary about the Art Basel fair and its effect on the city. He had previously made Rising Tide, a film documenting the fair’s impact on Miami, which aired in 2012 on a Florida PBS station.

When he arrived in Hong Kong, though, he realized he had underestimated the obstacles: a language barrier; an unfamiliarity with the city, especially compared to his native Miami; and a lack of access to some of the people whose stories he wanted to tell.

“As the bottom kept falling out on the movie I thought I was going to make, I realized the one person I had access to 24/7 was me,” he says. “So instead of making a bad version of the movie I set out to make, I figured I would make a different movie about how I failed to make the movie I set out to make.”

The resulting film, Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window, is a personal travelogue that highlights the senses of disorientation, loneliness, and wonderment that come with being a stranger in a strange land. It premiered in Austin at the South by Southwest film festival in March, and was screened on June 18 as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinemaFest.

In the film, which he shot entirely himself on a digital SLR camera and an iPhone, Hevia navigates Hong Kong—both within the context of Art Basel and outside of it—while grappling with the aftermath of a breakup and the difficulties of getting settled into his new home for 10 months. He winds up living in a space not much bigger than a closet with a loft bed, gets lost in an enormous indoor shopping mall, and seeks out, with varying degrees of success, local artists he can follow through Art Basel. The handheld camerawork and interposed shots of art galleries and street scenes (including footage from a protest in the wake of the city’s 2014 Umbrella Movement) give Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window a frenetic pace that leaves the viewer wanting to know more about everything they see.

Hevia said during a Q&A session following the BAM screening that many of his artistic choices in the film—including not shooting any clips longer than 10 seconds, making 10 months’ worth of footage feel like a compressed length of time, and using a speech-to-text robotic voice to deliver the second-person voiceover narration—were in service of finding a narrative that reflected his unsettled experience.

A text-to-speech robotic, second-person voiceover, for instance, “destabilized the ground, which reinforced the feeling I had in Hong Kong,” he said.

There were practical considerations, too. By not allowing himself to shoot any clips longer than 10 seconds, he not only cut down the amount of footage that he’d need to sort through, but he often appeared to be taking still photographs, giving him more freedom to shoot video in places where such activity is generally prohibited. After returning to the U.S., his editor and co-producer, Carlos David Rivera, helped him find the emotional center of the footage he had shot, acting as “part editor and part therapist,” Hevia said.

While he plans to continue writing and directing his own films—his next project, he says, will be his wedding video, which he hopes “strangers will want to watch on purpose”—Hevia also keeps busy with his work as a producer. He co-produced the Academy Award-winning 2016 feature Moonlight and now works full-time as North American vice president of Fabula, the Chilean production company founded by brothers Juan de Dios and Pablo Larraín.

With both his directing and producing work, Hevia says the Gabelli media management program was instrumental to getting him where he is in his career—not only through the Fulbright fellowship he won with the help of Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships but also through courses on the ever-shifting media landscape.

“Prior to Fordham, I felt like I had a grasp on what it took to make a film and how,” he explains. “What I was missing was a broader understanding of the why. The year I graduated film school [at Florida State University]was also the year YouTube launched, which heralded a seismic shift in content creation. Fordham gave me the tools to understand and engage with the new reality.”

Check the film’s official website for information on future screenings and watch the trailer below.

Working backward from No. 10, are our most popular posts of the year.

10. Actor Robert De Niro Tells IDHA Graduates: You Are My Heroes
(June 30) The Hollywood legend offered the commencement address to the 50th graduating class of Fordham’s International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance (IDHA).

9. Fordham Designated National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education
(April 3) The National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security have designated Fordham as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education (CAE-CDE).

8. Oscar-Nominated Moonlight Illuminates Miami Film’s Co-Producer
(February 24) Alumnus Andrew Hevia co-produced the film which took home Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

7. Rainbow Rams Represent Fordham in NYC’s Gay Pride March
(June 26) The university was represented for the first time in the annual Pride Parade by the Fordham University Alumni chapter of the Rainbow Rams.

6. Fordham Signs Pledge to Support Paris Climate Change Goals
(June 6) Fordham has joined 180 colleges and universities in signing a pledge, “We Are Still In,” to support the goals laid out by the Paris Climate Agreement.

Class of 2017 Urged to Face Unsettling Times With a Merciful Heart

5. Class of 2017: Face Unsettling Times with a Merciful Heart
(May 20) As thousands on Edwards Parade listened to commencement speaker Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, our news team posted videos of both before and after the ceremony.

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3. Father McShane Announces University Support for Immigrants and Refugees
(January 29) Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, issued the following statement with regard to President Trump’s executive order on refugees and immigration.

2. Fordham featured prominently on the New York City skyline last night.
(March 28) The Empire State Building was lit in maroon to commemorate Fordham’s 175th anniversary, and the dramatic photo helped boost our 175 Things to Know About Fordham series.

1. Jeopardy! 175th Anniversary Greeting for Fordham
(January 2017) Alex Trebek asking a Final Jeopardy! question on 19-letter words, a shout-out to Fordham’s (What is a) Dodransbicentennial. The post was seen by more than 108,000 viewers.

And then people saw the movie he co-produced in Miami. Released last fall, it was acclaimed as one of the year’s best films, breathtaking and groundbreaking, “a poem written in light, music and vivid human faces,” according to The New York Times. It won dozens of awards, including the Golden Globe for best drama, and it’s in the running for eight Oscars—including best picture and best director—at the 89th Academy Awards on Feb. 26, which Hevia plans to attend.

The movie is Moonlight, a drama about the tribulations of a young black man growing up in a struggling Miami neighborhood known locally as Liberty City, where the movie’s Oscar-nominated director, Barry Jenkins, grew up. Hevia, who earned a master’s degree in media entrepreneurship at the Gabelli School of Business, spoke to FORDHAM magazine from his home in Los Angeles about the importance of making movies like Moonlight that show a locale’s true character.

How did you become involved in the making of Moonlight?
Barry Jenkins and I both went to Florida State film school for undergrad, and one of my best friends was co-producer on Medicine for Melancholy, Barry’s first feature, which he shot in San Francisco in 2007 while I was living there. I loved the idea that they were filmmakers from my program who were actually making films from the ground up, outside the studio system. When it became clear to me that Barry had made a movie about San Francisco that people later talked about as the definitive San Francisco film, because of the look and feel of it, it bothered me on a level that is not rational that Barry wasn’t making that movie in Miami about Miami. I made it my goal to get Barry back to Miami to make a movie.

Then, in 2010 or 2011, Tarell Alvin McCraney gave me a copy of his unfinished play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue—the story that eventually became Moonlight. I introduced him to Barry, gave Barry a copy of the play, and told him, “This might be the thing you make in Miami.” Time passed, Barry digested it, then the veteran producer Adele Romanski got wind of it, and she and Barry got Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company, and the distributor A24 involved. They told me, “You’re the Miami guy. You should come on as co-producer.” I went to Miami after graduating from Fordham to start laying the groundwork.

Why did you feel so strongly about having Barry Jenkins make a movie in Miami?
When people think about Miami, they think about media produced by people from outside Miami, which often misses everything about the city that makes it such a strange and unique and wonderful place. An organization I co-founded in Miami 10 years ago, the Borscht Film Festival, is devoted to telling Miami stories—ideally, stories that go deeper than the South Beach or Miami Vice portrayal. One of the great things about new media is that more diverse voices can speak up for themselves, and communities can speak for themselves, so the goal of Borscht was to build that for Miami, a city of diverse voices. Again, one of my goals was always to get Barry back, and I did—in 2011, we produced a short film called Chlorophyll, in which Barry explored Miami with new eyes after growing up there and then finding his “voice” as a filmmaker in San Francisco.

What do you think Moonlight does for perceptions of Miami, particularly the Liberty City neighborhood?
I think this movie shows a part of Miami that is overlooked in mainstream media and the dominant consciousness. We had this happen a lot on the film—we would talk about Liberty City with people and they’d say, “Oh, you mean like The First 48,” a reality show that portrayed murder investigations in Liberty City and other Miami neighborhoods. If that’s the only story coming out of the neighborhood, that’s the public perception of the neighborhood. One of our goals was to make a film that showed a different side of Liberty City and showed what it was like to actually live there.

Naomie Harris has talked about being reluctant to play the mother of the main character, because so often, images of black women as crack addicts tend to be stereotyped characterizations of bad mothers. And one of the reasons she’s nominated for best supporting actress for it is that she fully rounded out that person and made it a real characterization of a woman who loves her child but is also struggling with this other problem. So you have the complicated messiness of actual life, not a simple, stereotyped version of bad people doing bad things.

What did you do as co-producer?
As a co-producer, my job description was basically “help Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski get the movie made.” During early pre-production, I was local to Miami, so I did a lot of the ground-level things like finding community partners and setting up casting events a few months before the rest of team arrived. During production my job description was a lot more flexible. On any movie, especially a small one, there are so many things you can’t control that you always need someone to help deal with the unexpected. That was me. I was a fireman, and my job was to solve problems and find solutions. It was a fantastic job and it was a privilege to work with this team. 

After Hong Kong, I went to Ecuador for two months to do another film, a family drama that takes place in Quito, under the cloud of an erupting volcano. I really like the specificity of place; it helps tremendously when stories make the effort to be authentic and grounded in actual places. It makes stories specific and personal.

Why do you think Moonlight has been so well-received?
Partly because it takes things you think you know and it pushes deeper. It tells a hidden story sincerely and with real feeling. It’s been amazing—I was at the International Film Festival Rotterdam recently, and I was talking to a blond Dutch girl who was telling me that she and her friend watched it and what they thought about it, and I’m thinking, this is so far from the demographic I had ever thought would see this movie, let alone have strong opinions of it, let alone talk about it like it was a necessary, urgent thing for her to have seen.

And that was a wonderful experience. I crossed an ocean, and they’re talking about this movie that takes place in this little neighborhood that has been marginalized and ignored by the dominant conversation for decades. When the international press describes it as a movie about the Miami you never see, to me, that’s mission accomplished.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Chris Gosier.

Watch the official trailer for Moonlight: