Our Team
Director - Anna Lo Westlin
Anna Lo Westlin is a Directing Fellow at the American Film Institute, where she is the recipient of the AFI AWARDS Audi Scholarship, The Tom Yoda Scholarship Award and The Women In Film/Tichi Wilkerson Kassel Endowed Scholarship.
Originally from Stockholm, Sweden, she began her film career as a production associate at Killer Films and Magnolia Pictures, where she held several positions including acquisitions executive. She thereafter served at SF Studios as an associate producer on the Academy Award-nominated film A MAN CALLED OVE; associate producer on the Cannes Film Festival Un Certain Regard Prize winner THE HAPPIEST DAY IN THE LIFE OF OLLI MÄKI and co-producer on BORG MCENROE, which opened the 2017 Toronto Film Festival; amongst others. Anna Lo wrote and directed the short film LADIES WHO LUNCH, which premiered at Way Out West, Scandinavia's largest film and music festival.
Anna Lo lives in Los Angeles with her partner and two young children.
www.annalowestlin.com
Writer - David Orantes
David Orantes is a proud son of immigrants, raised by a single mother in
Sun Valley, California.
David earned a BA in Film Production and Cinematography from Cal State Northridge in 2015. His freelance roles include DP, operator, key grip, and videographer. He has served the Los Angeles filmmaking community as a sales associate and rental manager for the retail store Filmtools, assisting professional creators while educating and introducing aspiring film and content makers to the craft and technology of filmmaking.
His background also includes over a decade of stage performance and collaboration alongside a variety of groups and musicians as a bass guitarist. In 2018, David wrote and directed his second short film, HEART LINES. He is a recent graduate from the American Film Institute Conservatory.
Cinematographer - Augusto Garcia
Augusto Garcia is a Mexican-American cinematographer currently based in Los Angeles. He has worked as a Director of Photography in different award-winning narrative short films, documentaries, music videos and commercials.
In 2017, Augusto won the award for best cinematography in the Mexican short film section in the Crystal Screen film festival. Augusto also has experience working as a gaffer for a Kazakhstan feature film co-produced by Mexico and as a Camera Assistant and Data Manager for different TV-series in Mexico produced by Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
In his academic life, Augusto obtained his BA in Film and Audiovisual Production from the Popular Autonomous University of the State of Puebla, in Mexico.
As part of an exchange program, he studied in the Film School of Uruguay, in Montevideo.
He is currently studying his MFA in Cinematography at the American Film Institute Conservatory (AFI), class of 2022.
Producer - Cindy Zixin Zhang
(Cindy) Zixin Zhang is a filmmaker and artist, who is a Producing Fellow at The American Film Institute. She has an MFA degree from Northwestern University with a focus in Documentary Media as a scholarship recipient, and a BFA degree in the School of Art Institute of Chicago with focuses in Film, Painting, and Sculpture as a merit scholarship recipient.
She worked for the documentary series LADY PARTS JUSTICE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER that premiered at Doc NYU. Cindy’s short documentary and narrative films, TED, BLOODY GLOVE BOX, and BOXED IN, have been selected by worldwide film festivals, including Flickers’ Rhode Island Int. Film Festival, Cannes Shorts, and WorldFest-Houston Int. Film Festival, etc.
She has produced and directed a feature documentary that is filmed in Antarctica about children’s education while exploring the world of science, art, and nature.
Production Designer - Yibo Kou
Yibo Kou was a student of the graduate film program at California College of the Arts. He also studied design for five years in China and holds a BArch Degree in Architecture.
As a filmmaker, he made several fiction and documentary films, such as TOUCH, SHE LIGHTS UP A FIRE, BULLY and AM I CRAZY. As an architect, his design project, Binh-Duong City Complex at Archiland Design Group, will be under construction in Vietnam.
He is good at sketching, marker performance, as well as watercolor and digital modeling. His graduation design won SAAD Best Graduation Design Award.
Yibo is presently a Production Design Fellow at The American Film Institute Conservatory (AFI), class of 2022.
Editor - Larissa Stang
Larissa Stang grew up in Berlin, Germany. She graduated from UNLV with a BA in film in 2015.
For the past four years, she was the editor for Vegas.com and Remark Entertainment working with clients like MGM, the Venetian and many local Las Vegas personalities, like Carrot Top and Tapeface. Independently, she has worked on several narrative and music video shorts.
Larissa is currently studying her MFA in Editing at the American Film Institute Conservatory (AFI), class of 2022.