A Brief Bio

Salvador Carrasco is a Mexican film director based in Santa Monica, California. He is the writer and director of the highly acclaimed and influential feature film “The Other Conquest,” a revisionist approach to the Spanish colonization of Mexico that focuses on the cultural resistance of the Aztec people.

At the time of its release in 1999 by 20th Century Fox, “The Other Conquest” became the highest grossing film in Mexican history and was widely regarded as a cultural phenomenon. When it came out in the USA, it became one of The Los Angeles Times’ and New York Times’ Top 10 Films of the Year, and it was re-released theatrically by Alliance Atlantic in 2008, garnering more than 50 positive reviews on IMDB. “The Other Conquest” is the subject of many scholarly works and academic research, is taught in university courses, and is often screened in film retrospectives and specialized museum exhibits worldwide (e.g., the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum in Berlin, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Getty Villa in Los Angeles). The film also procured Carrasco a lifetime honorary membership into the Directors Guild of America, in which he is an active member committed to promoting Latino diversity, and an invitation from The Academy of Motion Pictures to store and preserve the 35mm negative of “The Other Conquest” in perpetuity.

As a writer, Carrasco’s essays and poetry have appeared in several publications. He was the Moseley Fellow in Creative Writing at Pomona College, a distinction he shared with author David Foster Wallace. He is a regular contributor to Senses of Cinema, considered one of the world’s foremost publications of film critical studies. As an educator, Carrasco has taught filmmaking at the University of Southern California, Pomona College, and The Los Angeles Film School. As a result of a nationwide search in 2010, he was selected to create a filmmaking program at Santa Monica College (SMC), where he is now a tenured professor and Head of the Film Program. Carrasco’s mission to create “a high-quality program at the lowest possible cost” has become a tangible reality that has now been featured twice in Variety magazine and in the Hollywood Reporter. In 2022 MovieMaker ranked the SMC Film Program as one of the top 12 film schools in the U.S. West and one of the top 40 in North America. Carrasco executive-produces one student short each semester; these films have attained seven official selections at the Cannes Film Festival’s Emerging Filmmakers Showcase, including a Best Short Film distinction in 2021 (“Broken Layers”), and more than 150 recognitions domestically and abroad. Another SMC short, “Leaving the Factory,” won the Russo Brothers’ National Italian American Film Competition in 2022.

Carrasco has been featured as a guest film director at the CinemadaMare Film Festival in Italy, along with legendary directors Margarethe von Trotta and Krzysztof Zanussi. He was honored at the Aero Theater by the Santa Monica International Film Festival with the 2015 Impact Award, celebrating “the local and international educational, economic, and artistic impact” of his work as a filmmaker. In November 2022, ETHOS Film Awards named Carrasco the “Impact Director of the Year.”

Carrasco is currently developing new film projects through his production company, Salvastian Pictures, among which are the adaptation of award-winning Native American author Stephen Graham Jones’s most celebrated story —Father, Son, Holy Rabbit— and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s “Lovers on All Saints’ Day.”