Jim Vendiola is an award-winning writer/director, development executive, and three-time Newcity magazine “Film 50” honoree. His work has been described as “highly stylized and casually transgressive,” and frequently explores ideas of heartache, longing, liminality, eros, and pathos. As a Filipino-American with immigrant parents, he makes work that ponders themes of identity, otherness, and alienation. His psychological horror short, Violets, which reframes the genre's more common predator/prey dynamic, received the 22nd Chicago Underground Film Festival's Audience Award. His kink-positive follow-up Library Hours is a reimagined approach to vintage erotica nominated for Best Short Film by NewFilmmakers LA. Reviewing its sold-out West Coast Premiere at HBO's Outfest LA, one critic wrote, “The material in the hands of a lesser writer or director could have been exploitative, sexually gratuitous, and even insensitive, but under Jim Vendiola [it] is anything but.” Jim’s debut feature—a supernatural thriller called Homesick—is currently in late development with the Chicago Film Project.
