Sofia Alvarez, born 1984 in Buenos Aires, is an award-winning filmmaker whose work spans documentary and narrative cinema.

Sofia, your early films drew heavily from personal experience. How do you decide when life becomes material?

Everything starts from something that disturbs me — a feeling I can't shake or a question I keep asking. I never set out to make autobiographical work, but the distance between life and story collapses when you care enough about something.

What does the creative process look like for you at its very beginning?

Chaos, mostly. I keep a lot of notebooks. I write fragments, images, lines of dialogue. The real work is in finding the connections — understanding what all these pieces have to say to each other. It can take months before a film reveals itself to me.