One afternoon last September, Juan Diego Silva-Zúñiga, 25, was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, reading a short story by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, when a band started to play an indie-rock song. The six male musicians—one on the bass, one on the drums, two guitarists, a trumpet player, and a singer—had long hair like Silva-Zúñiga and looked about his age. They called themselves Pan Arcadia.
At the end of Pan Arcadia’s set, Silva-Zúñiga went up to the men and offered to direct their next music video. “I won’t charge you a single penny,” he told the band. “All I want is to work right now.” That music video—for the song “Hysteria,” from Pan Arcadia’s new EP, LIFE: As if I Know It—is out today.
Born in Guadalajara and raised in Torreón, Mexico, Silva-Zúñiga grew up with a single mother and younger sister, taking on the role of “man of the house” at a very young age.
Despite Silva-Zúñiga’s early interest in the arts, they were deemed too “girly” for a young boy and therefore off-limits. Each Christmas he would ask for a camera, and he recalls the disappointment of watching his sister and female cousins receive them instead. As a result, Silva-Zúñiga focused on sports, and, at 16, signed up for a military school in a town in Missouri ironically called Mexico.
After graduating from Missouri Military Academy in 2017, Silva-Zúñiga enrolled as a law student at the Escuela Libre de Derecho (E.L.D.) in Mexico City, where he spent his Friday nights watching movies with classmates. His friend group called themselves the “long-haired contingent”—law students who wrote poetry and watched foreign films in their free time.
Silva-Zúñiga credits the 1990 Iranian crime film Close-Up, by Abbas Kiarostami, with sparking his interest in film. “I realized how much you can do with a camera … [and] that there was no reason why a young Mexican man in the middle of nowhere pirating an Iranian movie, should feel completely connected to this random person from 40 years ago,” he says. “I just felt that I could do that for other people.”
Silva-Zúñiga began directing short films with his friends in his free time. For a short film called “Estación Marte,” he took 14 of his friends to the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert to simulate the landscape of Mars. They were there for three days with minimal food and supplies.
After graduating from E.L.D. in 2022 with honors and enough footage for a director’s reel, Silva-Zúñiga told his mother he was quitting his law job, which he had been juggling with classes, to move to New York. He recalls thinking that “this is probably the last moment in my life where I’m going to be able to make a decision this irresponsible.... If I don’t make this jump right now, I’m going to be stuck in this office, in this city, for the rest of my life.”
He had only been living in New York for a month when he approached the indie-rock band Pan Arcadia in Washington Square. When they agreed to collaborate on a music video, Silva-Zúñiga hadn’t yet secured a production crew, equipment, a cast, costumes, or a set. “I knew that the only way I could get a sizable crew for my next project was if I accumulated favors en masse,” he says. “I just started working on every set that I could.”
After assembling the crew, Silva-Zúñiga put up casting-call posters at Pan Arcadia’s Bowery Ballroom concerts. For costumes, he joined a soccer league and sneakily offered to clean the team’s uniforms before their next game. He used a soccer field on the Lower East Side, a New School library, and a friend’s ballet studio as his sets.
“Filmmaking is like going to war—there’s no rules. Especially when there’s no money,” says Silva-Zúñiga. “How can we shoot inside here with no one finding out? How many things can we steal before somebody realizes?”
Silva-Zúñiga is currently working on his first feature film, Inertia. He keeps a drawing of himself holding an Academy Award taped to his bathroom mirror. “It’s what makes me get up every morning,” he says. “I think I’m just an ignorant fool. I’m too dumb to think that what I want can’t be done.”
“I’m good at the things that I hate—I was a good lawyer, a good military-school student. What if I just do the things that I like?”
“Hysteria” is out now on YouTube
Carolina de Armas is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
