| Patricia Ortega | |
| Birth Place: | Maracaibo, Venezuela |
| Alma Mater: | Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión |
| Yearsactive: | 2004–present |
Patricia Ortega (Venezuelan pronounced as /es/, born 1977) is a Venezuelan film director. She has won multiple accolades, particularly for her 2018 film Being Impossible.
Ortega says that she has been a movie lover since she was young, and so the decision to become a filmmaker was natural. She has studied journalism at university.[1]
Ortega studied at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión in Cuba, specialising in Film Direction.
After creating some short films, Ortega became president of the independent Venezuelan production company Mandrágora Films in 2009. In the next ten years, she made ten short fiction and documentary films with the company; in 2013 she directed her first feature film, El regreso (English: The Return), which saw a wide commercial release in cinemas across Venezuela.
Her second feature film, Being Impossible (Spanish: Yo, imposible), however, did well internationally and has yet to be released in her home nation. Ortega has drawn strength from Being Impossible during times of both personal and political upheaval. She found out that Being Impossible would be screening at the US film festival South by Southwest on the same day that Juan Guaidó was declared Acting President of Venezuela; she found the news of the screening "beautiful", but this was overwhelmed by the political situation that "worried" her. Ortega won the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards at the Venezuelan Film Festival in June 2019 for Being Impossible.
In 2019, she began development of her third feature film, Mamacruz.[2]
Ortega was raised in a religious Catholic family, and says that she was always the black sheep of the family who did not follow traditional roles. She is divorced,[3] and has lived in Porlamar on the Venezuelan Caribbean island of Margarita since January 2019.[4]
| scope=col | Year | scope=col | Event | scope=col | Award | scope=col | Work | scope=col | Result | class=unsortable scope=col | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | Festival Entre Largos y Cortos de Oriente (ELCO) | Best First Feature | The Return | [6] | |||||||
| 2014 | Margarita Latin American and Caribbean Film Festival | Golden Pelican for Best Fiction Film | [7] | ||||||||
| 2018 | Havana Film Festival | Unete Award | Being Impossible | ||||||||
| Valladolid International Film Festival | Rainbow Spike Award | [8] | |||||||||
| 2019 | Femme Revolution Film Fest | Best Construction of a Female Character | |||||||||
| Amsterdam LGBTI Film Festival | Best Mix Feature Audience Award | ||||||||||
| Reflections of Spanish and Latin American Cinema Festival | Audience Award | ||||||||||
| South by Southwest | Gamechanger Award | [9] | |||||||||
| Venezuelan Film Festival | Best Director | [10] | |||||||||
| Best Screenplay (with Enmanuel Chávez) | |||||||||||
| Houston International LGBTQ Film Festival | Best Script (with Enmanuel Chávez) | [11] | |||||||||
| 2020 | Platino Awards | Best Director | [12] |