Victor Nunez

This film director, a founding member of the Independent Feature Project, has made a name with low-budget, non-"Hollywood" projects which gestate for as long as ten years before being filmed. Nunez - who grew up in Peru and in Tallahassee, Florida - completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in film, then worked on educational and industrial shorts. Nunez made three fictional shorts in the 1970s. Taking Care of Mother Baldwin (1970), was about a boy's tentative friendship with a woman neighbor. Charly Benson's Return to the Sea (1972), follows a returning Vietnam veteran. A Circle in the Fire (1974) was adapted from a Flannery O'Connor story about a dairy farm's inhabitants. Nunez made his feature debut in 1979 with Gal Young Un (1979), a low-budget drama set during the 1920s, based on the story of the same name by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It tells the story of a widowed Florida woman, her bootlegger second husband, and his mistress, the title character. Six years elapsed before Nunez completed another feature, A Flash of Green (1984), his first to employ big-name actors. Adapted from a John D. MacDonald novel, this fine, offbeat story of a reporter investigating a suspect landfill development deal in a small Florida coastal town starred Ed Harris, Blair Brown, and Richard Jordan. After nearly ten years of futile Hollywood pitch meetings, Nunez financed his third film, Ruby in Paradise (1993) using an inheritance of $400,000. The film presents his touching tale of a young girl's journey of self-discovery from the back roads of Tennessee to Florida. Like Nunez's previous films, the movie was a hit on the festival circuit, and star Ashley Judd was trumpeted as a promising newcomer. The film's look also received praise: Nunez served as his own cameraman (under director of photography Alex Vlacos), and Ruby in Paradise (1993) was shot in Super-16 for a grainy, muted effect. He followed Ruby with two more films set in the Florida panhandle, Ulee's Gold (1997) and Coastlines (2002).