Creator Spotlight: Patricia Silva

Telling Queer Stories Through Lenses, Histories, and Honest Frames

Patricia Silva is a non-binary, queer filmmaker and visual artist whose work amplifies underrepresented voices through historically grounded, community-driven storytelling. With roots in photography and a deep commitment to preserving Queer histories, Patricia’s journey into filmmaking blends artistic experimentation with urgent social commentary. Their first feature, Bright Vignettes: How Astoria Got Its Pride, captures the spirit of a neighborhood’s inaugural Pride celebration, threading personal narratives and collective resilience into a vital portrait of place, presence, and possibility.

Patricia Silva

What was your journey to filmmaking?

Initially, I studied photography to become a printer. I imagined myself in a large darkroom, surrounded by a rotating visual encyclopedia of drying prints, and having very intellectual conversations with all kinds of photographers. So unrealistic! I ended up becoming a photo editor early on, working in news and entertainment. Very corporate. My family had emigrated to the US six years earlier when I enrolled at an arts school in New York City, with funds from a national arts prize which I only obtained because two teachers encouraged me to apply. Without emergency funds I began working while studying and learned a lot about efficiency and team building among creative roles. I saw myself getting things done and problem solving under pressure, which…half way through a baccalaureate degree was very confidence-building. Especially when people told me I couldn’t do it, or didn’t expect me to do it well. But film remained a very expensive discipline, more than photography. When digital photography cameras became equipped with video, making films became accessible and I enrolled in a graduate study program to focus on video, installation, and structuring ideas.

What inspired you to create Bright Vignettes: How Astoria Got Its Pride?

This film emerged out of a visual research project I’ve been developing about Queer spaces throughout the borough of Queens. In addition to making other works, I used to spend my summers cycling around, photographing sites of Queer history in New York City’s largest and most industrial borough. At the time of writing funding proposals for Bright Vignettes, I was also finalizing an essay about this visual research for The Physical and the Digital City, Invisible Forces, Data and Manifestations. Several things converged within weeks: contemplating the potential of Queer geography for that essay, legislation being introduced at alarming rates, going to Astoria Pride in 2023 and filming it. Months later I reviewed that footage and felt such a sense of urgency to celebrate that milestone, but within a longer historical arc. Bright Vignettes is the first opportunity I’ve had to condense part of my research into a film and center a single neighborhood. It’s a tangible record within a larger borough-wide project on LGBTQ+ histories, working class histories that even today remain completely unacknowledged in broader NYC history.

The form of Bright Vignettes was informed by Astoria’s own geography of density and expansiveness combined with participant stories. The film is dialogue-driven with breaks for music, marching, and a park segment, but the way it came about was more Fluxus-style. I recognized people on the street from my footage and asked if they were willing to be in the film. Six participants in the film were selected like that!

Trailer for Bright Vignettes

In the editing stage I was more deliberate. Astoria is low-rise with wide skies but dense streets and like all cities you don’t see what’s around the corner until you turn it. Bright Vignettes turns a corner every ten minutes or so, new voices are constantly being introduced up until the last 15 minutes. The film doesn’t have a narrative center, it moves onward and forward like the progress our neighborhood has made. There’s no build-up to the inaugural Pride, the film just starts with it. There aren’t a series of “hooks” or fabricated tensions despite participants bringing up personal experiences with on-going crises: youth homelessness, sexual trafficking, Pulse nightclub shooting, fear of public violence. I didn’t ask for elaboration on difficult experiences because I didn’t want to center trauma and treat people as evidence. Bright Vignettes is about Queer people’s history and futures, their ideas for shaping the spaces they exist in. Identity completely informs such decisions but, for once, I didn’t want to make a film about Queer identity, I wanted to center what Queer people envision for their shared futures.

Could you tell us a little about the film itself?

It’s the story of Queer presence in an outer borough neighborhood less than one nautical mile from midtown Manhattan in New York City. Even in the city famous for the first Pride March, the Stonewall Inn, and the flying brick that galvanized the Queer rights movement in 1969, there are neighborhoods hosting their first ever public Pride events in the 2020s. Astoria is one of those neighborhoods. In 2023 when Astoria held its inaugural Pride in June, the United States was experiencing unprecedented levels of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation bills being introduced and passed.  Hate crimes were increasing here, some were covered on local news. There is that urgency in the film, of human rights aggressively rescinding while Astorians make quiet history with an inaugural Pride event featuring mostly people of color, trans, and non-binary performers of all orientations. It would have been a more coherent film had I stopped there, but I wanted to include the 30+ years of LGBTQ+ presence in Astoria so I kept going and going! Like the Astoria Queer scene, the film is more prismatic than coherent.

What were some of the biggest creative or logistical challenges you faced during the process?

Stretching a small budget is always a logistical challenge. This film couldn’t have been made without the most valuable of currencies, generosity: friends who showed up and held reflectors; bar tenders who showed up earlier to open bars and move chairs around; Brian who offered me and everyone in the film a space to review final cut all together; Salvatore and Max who worked overtime knowing that I couldn’t compensate them beyond our initial agreement. I was able to secure three arts grants to fund this film, but it was not enough. Scheduling also posed its own challenges because I interviewed 24 participants for Bright Vignettes—double what I originally budgeted for. But this didn’t bother me because the film needed those perspectives as it grew. Every single person in this film, on either side of the camera, balances multiple jobs while tending to a creative career so we just made it happen. With patience and planning everything was possible. 

Creatively, I could have used more on-set hands with reflectors for outdoor scenes. That would have been preferable to asking participants to move over because the sun was now fully on them. Recording an interview in a public park during Climate Week NYC, which coincided with the United Nations General Assembly in September—I had not anticipated so much low-flying air traffic that morning across the East River. That was the most difficult interview because we had to wait so long between takes. Even with a hypercardioid mic I was picking up jet propulsion on the audio. And I did that interview by myself because I couldn’t get a sound person for the last few interviews.

It was your first feature film. How was the creative process different from your previous work, and what did you learn from it?

Having an in-depth collaboration with a composer was new. Salvatore Zanelli and I met on the street, at Queens Pride. We saw each other again a couple of weeks later, marching in Astoria. By the time I obtained funding for Bright Vignettes I knew Salvatore had studied music composition and piano. It was inevitable! I asked if he would consider working together, we arranged a meeting and talked it through. Then Salvatore astounded me. The composition Salvatore developed for the ending encapsulates all the undercurrents of the film: urgency, joy, solidarity. 

Working on an 80 minute feature with 24 interviews was a leap from previous films where my longest was 20 minutes. Maybe because I knew this material really well and writing the essay helped me clarify what I wanted to achieve with the film, I wasn’t intimidated by expanding what I thought would become a 30 minute short film into an 80 min feature. Presenting an accurate historical record and giving space to what participants felt strongly about was more important than imposing a time constraint. The first rough cut of Bright Vignettes was over two hours, final cut was 90 minutes but I still trimmed down to 80.

What message or impact do you hope the film has on viewers?

Locally, I hope people feel affirmed by a sense of cultural continuity, community, and solidarity. Domestically, I think the film shows a side of New York City that is unique and innovative, with more diversity and longevity than given credit for.

Internationally, I hope people see that the US is not a monolith, and that even in New York City we still have much progress to attain. We’re just in a very rich and privileged city, but our city’s riches don’t reach everyone. Like Queensborough itself, Astoria’s current and historical residents are from all over the globe. We’re here, we’re Queer, we’re making the best of it and we welcome you—that’s the vibe in the bars here, which differs from the stereotype still dominating perceptions of normative Queerness in the US: young, affluent, gym-chiseled, White Gay Boys of Chelsea or San Francisco. But ours is not a perfect community. Everyone expressed that we still need much more allyship from local businesses, more Queer spaces, at least one lesbian-owned space, as well as more Queer youth-centered programming.

What other films have you made in the past?

I’ve made 14 short films prior to 2025 and what they all have in common thematically is that a good majority of them are about gesture, queerness, and how geographic placement determines so much. Some are formal experiments while others are essay films. I have never worked from a script, only from storyboarding that always evolves. Mass Swell was about the three Queer women leading the Ferguson Movement, and the role that faith organizations played in supporting the uprising. Suspensions, Infinite is about one hundred years of labor deprecation throughlines within one family, from Iberian agriculture to late 1990s internet culture. My most screened film is Self and Others, a Queer reordering of cinematic gestures and I thought a lot about it when editing Bright Vignettes. I could have applied more B-roll, but Queer gesture is so individualized and fascinating, I did not want to cover up the speakers too much. Queer expressiveness is also an everyday-ness of gesture, it’s so cool.

As a non-binary, queer filmmaker navigating independent film, what has your experience been like?

In terms of how I identify, I’ve only found allyship and support. Navigating independent film outside of the studio system or streamer platforms presents larger challenges than how I identify because of funding. In the US, making films that don’t depend on big stars to draw an audience and making films that don’t conform to a pre-existing format for any given category—that makes things more difficult because few institutions will fund something they don’t think they can package or distribute.

Patricia Silva working

What I’ve done is try to be very clear about who I make films for and how am I reaching people who care, while seeking funding sources that allow me the autonomy to guarantee that what people entrust me with will be respected and not compromised because an executive doesn’t understand someone different from them. I feel very responsible to what people entrust me with. How I move through the world (identity, classification, access, resources) informs how I work but creating independently presents challenges and efficiencies: for autonomy and creativity it’s fantastic, but in terms of securing funding and having wider audiences there’s disadvantages.

At the early stages of planning Bright Vignettes I considered interviewing Jiggly Caliente, Jax, Jan Sport, and Dusty Ray Bottoms. Each of these artists lived and performed in Astoria before being in RuPaul’s Drag Race and becoming celebrities. Having such names in the film would have been more attractive to funders and distributors, but I had to ask myself: is that the story of right now? The answer was No. As much as I love those performers, especially Jiggly who we lost too soon, I wanted to highlight the hardworking pros making good change here and now. That’s a different imperative that to a funder or distributor only presents “risk.” But as a director, making a film that doesn’t reflect integrity presents its own risk. You have to choose your choices.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to emerging creators from underrepresented backgrounds?

Don’t wait. For 100% funding, for the perfect producer, perfect team, don’t wait. Make something your communities will understand and relate to, and fight for the accurate representation your work requires, don’t settle for what people outside your communities are expecting. Get very real with yourself about your craft: what are the three things only you can contribute to your film, three elements that would compromise the outcome if you were not involved? Once you identify those non-negotiables, develop a strategy. Apply for funding that retains your autonomy to maintain those non-negotiables and hire professionals for areas beyond your skillset—in my case it has been musical scores and audio post production. A film requires so many different modes of attention and it’s best to not dilute each role. Today, the “I can do it all on my phone” approach is much propagandized on social media but in practice—it takes so much more time to do everything yourself. It’s possible, but it takes longer to grow creatively, longer to execute, and it feels very ‘factory’ after a while. So, don’t wait but strategize. We are not content factories, we’re built to work with others and build the worlds we want through expertise. It’s never too late to start. 

Highlights from the Works of Patricia Silva

What are you currently working on - or dreaming of creating in the future?

I’m still dreaming of how to shape a follow-up to Bright Vignettes, I have so much incredible material, and much to go in-depth with. Until I settle that idea, I’m making plans for my next short film, which will be much shorter at 10 to 15 minutes. Or so I expect, at this moment.