For filmmaker Gabriela Garcia Medina ’01, the hustle is half the magic

Gabriela Garcia Medina ’01’s first short film, Little Con Lili, was inspired by her mother’s inventive methods of making ends meet as a working class parent in London in the 1980s and ’90s. Now back in London and a mother to two children of her own, Gabriela is the proud embodiment of that hustler spirit, developing a sweeping slate of film and television projects at any given moment. Read on to learn about Gabriela’s journey around the world and into the arts, and how a successful spoken word poet became, it seems, the hardest-working Hollywood director in London.

It’s not entirely clear that Gabriela Garcia Medina ’01 ever sleeps. 

Things that she does do include: raising a three-year-old and seven-year-old alongside her husband; traveling frequently between London and Los Angeles for work; writing and directing several feature films, short films, and anthology series at once; pitching her concepts for many of these at major international film festivals; writing grant applications for projects in need of additional funding; learning to play favorite movie soundtracks on the piano; tutoring of UK students preparing for their 11+ entrance exams; leading a film club at her daughter's school, and salsa dancing on Sunday nights.

Somehow, this doesn’t send Gabriela into the tailspin that such a list might suggest. She takes her extremely busy life and work in stride, mentioning each additional activity casually and organically over the course of an hour-long conversation. Anyway, as a rule, she loves a list.

“I have a list right in front of me: It’s a bunch of different lists for the different projects I’m working on,” Gabriela says, explaining how she manages her world. “Every day, I write a list of what I’m doing and check it off.” She starts with easy, administrative tasks. Only once these are complete is her brain free to move on to the creative side of things, which is where she feels at home.

After nearly 20 years in California and around the US, Gabriela is once again based in London, where she has been living with her husband—and, now, her young family—since just before COVID.

“I’m Cuban British first,” Gabriela explains. She and her family moved from Cuba to the UK when Gabriela was 7. For her first six years in London, she attended state schools. The last of these schools was rough, and Gabriela remembers getting jumped there, more than once.

Her parents saved up to send Gabriela to ASL for Grades 8 through 10, after which they relocated to Geneva for work. “I didn’t really settle there,” she says of Switzerland. “The language was hard. I ended up spending my last year of high school in Madrid. I had an apartment and a roommate, and I got a job. It was like being in college, but a year early.”

From the start of Grade 9 through graduation, Gabriela attended four different high schools, but ASL remains her favorite.

Gabriela went to UCLA to become an actor. “I played Wendy in Peter Pan at ASL. I’ve always liked to act; to perform,” she says. “I loved film, but I wanted to pursue acting, rather than directing, because I had never felt that directing was accessible to me as a Latina woman and as an immigrant.”

Soon after she got to Los Angeles, however, the US of Gabriela’s imagination proved to be false, and the world she found herself inhabiting was bleak. “I think the US generally does a very good job of marketing their culture,” she says. But having moved to California with an idealized vision in mind, Gabriela arrived only to find that, among other things, the Hollywood Walk of Fame—sparkling and glamorous in movies—was, in fact, dingy and depressing. 

“In London, diversity is normal,” says Gabriela. “There is everybody, and we all interact together, and it’s beautiful. I think it makes more empathetic human beings.” When she arrived in LA for college, she says, “It was the first time I felt that I was in this ‘other’ category: Latinos. There were 65 people in my program my year, and I was one of three Latinos.”

This other-ness dimmed Gabriela’s acting aspirations. “I had always felt very determined that I could do anything—but for the first time, I thought, ‘This box that I’m in means that I am not going to be up for the same things that other people are.’” She graduated with a BFA in theater from UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, with minors in both Chicana/o Studies and African American Studies. “I had gone to UCLA with very little depth,” Gabriela remarks, “and I gained so much understanding of the world in the years I was there.”

In her time as an undergraduate, in addition to classes, Gabriela taught at the school’s community programs office, worked with at-risk youth through arts outreach programs, and represented UCLA at the World Social Forum in Brazil, where she was an artist in residence. Gabriela received the UCLA president’s Woman for Social Change award when she graduated, which, to this day, means more to her than her diploma.

Leaving UCLA in 2005, Gabriela had a boyfriend who, thanks to the HBO show Def Poetry, knew the price people were willing to pay for compelling spoken word poetry. 

“He knew I was writing, though I had only written one thing,” Gabriela remembers. “He was hired to perform poetry at a university, and offered me $50 to read my poem as his opening act. I said, ‘$50? Awesome.’ When I saw the check he got, though, it was for $4,000.”

Gabriela, suddenly glimpsing a big opportunity, developed a one-woman spoken word poetry show about everything from identity to social justice to culture to womanhood. She got an agent, opened for artists like the Black Eyed Peas and Pitbull, and traveled around the US, performing at colleges and universities. “It went really well, really quickly,” she says.

Gabriela would perform five or six poems over an hour-long show at a college, answer audience questions, and get taken out to dinner by whichever student group had invited her to their campus. She was making a real living as an artist, and was very proud of that.

Two years on, though, she began to feel lonely. “I got very stale and complacent in my work,” Gabriela recalls. “Even if I wrote new stuff, I always had to perform those five or six poems I knew they were paying me for. I would go to these schools and be in my head the entire time, not feeling anything; not aware of anything.”

Gabriela decided that she needed to make a change, so she went to the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts, to pursue two MFA degrees at once—one in theater, and the other in creative writing. “I was one of just a few students who had ever done that,” Gabriela says. “I loved it, and I would never change anything that I loved,” she adds, but it was not easy.

She began having panic attacks on the drive home, and, in addition to her courses, plays, and thesis work, held (at least) four jobs at once: “I was working on campus, running the students with disabilities program and the writing program at the library. I was a TA (teacher’s assistant) for film, screenwriting, and acting classes, and was working weekends as a cocktail waitress in Chinatown, and also working weekends at Umami Burger in Studio City, as a server,” Gabriela recounts.

“My mom is kind of a hustler,” Gabriela laughs. With a child to provide for in London, she found creative ways of making ends meet, “She would take pens and notebooks from her office so I could have pens to write with, and paper to write on,” says Gabriela. “She sometimes took toilet paper from restaurants. She didn’t do these things because she had a skewed moral compass—but because she was an immigrant surviving in the UK, and she wanted me to have everything I could possibly need.”

Her mother’s struggles as a working class parent in an expensive city far from home inspired Gabriela’s creative writing master’s thesis, a young adult novella called Little Con Lili.

After CalArts, Gabriela adapted Little Con Lili for the screen—but she didn’t know at the time how to structure a script. Still, she submitted the draft to Hedgebrook, a women’s writing residency program, and was flown out to a windswept island in the Puget Sound, north of Seattle, where she was given a beautiful cabin to live and write in, fellow female screenwriters to befriend, and, crucially, a mentor.
 
“My mentor was life-changing for me,” Gabriela says. Robin Swicord, who still mentors Gabriela to this day, is an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and producer, who wrote the screenplays for Matilda, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, among others.

With Robin championing her work, producers suddenly took a much keener interest in Gabriela. Between that connection, and that of a close friend with a link to Mandalay Pictures, Gabriela got her reworked Little Con Lili script in front of Jason Michael Berman, who was Mandalay’s vice president at the time.

Mandalay liked the script, but pointed out Gabriela’s lack of directing experience. They told her to make a short film as proof of concept. “So I went and made Little Con Lili as a really good short,” she says. They shot it over just two days, and for only $6,000—“and by pulling a lot of favors,” Gabriela adds.

She brought the film back to Mandalay, where she was told not to submit it to festivals, as it was intended for producers’ and executives’ eyes only. “‘Actually, I financed most of this, and I want it out there,’” Gabriela replied, and she began submitting the film to festivals.

Little Con Lili won several awards and a $10,000, two-year distribution deal with HBO. Gabriela had recouped her $6,000, and immediately put the remaining $4,000 toward her second short film, The 90 Day Plan, which was shot in less than a day.

“Directing became my favorite thing—more than writing—because I like collaborating and problem-solving,” Gabriela says. “When I have all these things happening at the same time, I can stand calm in the center and figure out the best way to get to the finish line.”

Gabriela glances at the corkboard in front of her, where she tracks all of her ongoing projects. She just finished a proof of concept video for a project called #Blessed, which Gabriela describes as a “neo-screwball, martial arts, feminist, romantic comedy about a love-obsessed woman who becomes a martial arts master in order to save the busboy at a local club from getting bullied by two Mexican wrestlers.” 

#Blessed is overwhelmingly pink—Gabriela has just given her final notes on color for the proof of concept—and it’s Coen brothers–esque. “It’s like Raising Arizona meets a screwball ’90s movie with a little bit of Tarantino or Kung Fu Hustle, with a ’90s Mexipop soundtrack.” 

She has a feature film script, which she developed through a Rideback Rise fellowship in LA in 2024, and a short called Skrrrt! (always pronounced in the drawn-out high pitch that the title demands), produced by Cate Blanchett and Coco Francini and financed by Netflix, which is also festival-bound this year.

Two years ago, Gabriela pitched a proof of concept for For Your Own Good at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival. Of the approximately 900 submissions Tribeca had received, Gabriela was chosen as one of five finalists, and made her pitch to a celebrity panel. The pitch was meant for films that could be made with a million-dollar budget, which For Your Own Good—being the most classically commercial of the five, and featuring a nine-person ensemble on screen for nearly the entire film—could not. 

She didn’t win the million dollars at Tribeca. Still, Gabriela says, “Everything was so tight, thanks to Tribeca, that by the time Unapologetic Projects”—an interested financier—“got to it, they said, ‘We love the pitch deck, and we love the script.’” All that Unapologetic asked in exchange for their offer to finance half of the budget was that Gabriela make the film with I Can & I Will Productions, Emmy award–winning actress Gina Rodriguez’s production company. Gabriela and I Can & I Will now work together weekly, and are currently in what’s called the “packaging” stage.

Gabriela has a proof of concept for Cuqui, an anthology series which will feature a series of high-stakes Uber rides around the world. “It’s an immigrant story, but a really funny one,” says Gabriela of the first episode, in which a sunnily disposed, five-star Uber driver, desperately trying to earn enough money in 24 hours to sponsor her mother’s immigration to the US, is saddled with “a passenger from hell.” 

Gabriela likes to tell stories with truthful, resonant things to say about very real issues—while also being joyful and silly. “I am trying to prove that you can have Black and Brown stories that don’t have to be so ‘Sundance’-y; I want my stuff to be cool and commercial,” Gabriela emphasizes. “I tell stories so people feel seen—especially those who rarely see themselves on screen. By telling stories of underrepresented people I also hope that I humanize their experience, and I hope to bring joy to my community.”

An avid salsa dancer ever since college, Gabriela has a salsa story to tell, too, and is in talks with a different production company about making it into a movie: it’s an underdog tale that brings the Jamaican bobsledders of Cool Runnings in step with the New York City schoolchildren of the 2005 documentary Mad Hot Ballroom. 

In January, Gabriela was hired to direct a $10M feature film: Tenor by Night. “It’s a musical, magical realism, action comedy about a Chinese immigrant who comes to the US wanting to pursue his dream of going to Juilliard, but life gets in the way. He ends up hustling to survive, starting a mannequin business, and putting his dream aside,” Gabriela says. “Now he’s nearing 50 and wonders if maybe it’s not too late for him to pursue his childhood dream.”

While the concept is well within Gabriela’s wheelhouse—full of joy and hustle—it isn’t one of her originals: It came from an ODA, or open directing assignment, that her agent knew she would fit perfectly. After more than three months of pitching, Gabriela won the job, and immediately got to work: She’s currently finalizing script adjustments, and interviewing potential heads of department, assembling a dream team for production. This summer, in New York and New Jersey, the team will come together to shoot the film.

“While I do all this free work,” Gabriela says, meaning everything from writing, to making proofs of concept, to pitching those concepts in front of festival panels and financiers, “until my deal is made, I am always hustling. I told my husband that until the literal first day of production comes, I’m going to keep working side hustles; teaching; tutoring. You just never know, and we have two kids. I’m always hustling.”