Pilar Timpane and Victoria Bouloubasis

Pilar (left) and Victoria.

Illustration by Margarita Babina

Pilar Timpane and Victoria Bouloubasis are “making waves” in Durham! Award winning directors teamed up for a film about your favorite cafe, Cocoa Cinnamon.

TV Show you are binging on right now? 

Pilar: Most recently my partner and I binged The Bear, a new show on Hulu FX about a young chef taking over his brother’s restaurant in Chicago. Beautiful cinematography, writing, and amazing ensemble cast. Highly recommended. *Chef’s kiss.*

Victoria: The new season of Atlanta is wild. WILD!

A song, a book, and a food that define you right now? 

Pilar: Victoria is going to kill me but it’s probably “Ojitos Lindos” song by Bad Bunny, which I’ve had on repeat all summer.

Delving into research for a documentary project on women in the Catholic Church, I’m reading Our Lady of Everyday Life by Maria Socorro Lilies Castañedas, a fantastic ethnography about women’s spirituality and the Virgen de Guadalupe.

Enormous amounts of heirloom tomatoes with salt on fresh bread. 

Victoria: For the record, I will not kill Pilar or anyone for enjoying Benito, the king of emo perreo. All of Durham knows I am in love with Bad Bunny. But I’m not the only one. We’re not selfish. Alos, I’ve been on a Greek bouzouki kick (which admittedly, for me, lasts a lifetime) and finding musicians who blend it into unlikely genres. Right now I’m obsessed with indie singer Σtella (Stella Chronopoulou) and her latest Up and Away. It’s got a trippy retro vibe (imagine a 1960s hookah bar), a super cute animated video, and that echoing bouzouki solo reminding me of my childhood;

Customs, Solmaz Sharif’s second book of poems. It’s heavy but gorgeous.

Slow-roasted tomato and garlic confit on anything, tomato salad with island capers, feta and fresh herbs, tomatoes straight off the vine. Tis the season.

You recently created a film together about Cocoa Cinnamon. What is the key to a successful partnership?   

Pilar: This project was so special. It has everyone’s voice in it who worked on it. We had such amazing muses, namely, Areli and Leon of Cocoa Cinnamon. Their story was such a fountain of interesting archival material. Our shared love for history, food, and Mexican iconography and culture really came through in the images we produced.

For our own partnership, V and I are super good friends who talk all the time about our ideas. Making a film about a gem in our community we both cherish flowed so easily! With the eye of Artistic Director Lauren Vied Allen, we formed a little triangle of creative expression that really took on something special to all of us, especially in the scenes with set design.

Victoria and I are both freelance, so we have to structure our time in a very specific way. We know how daunting it can be to fund independent work, so we respect each other’s ideas and process a lot. That’s something we both understand about each other as a basis for our shared creative work. I’m grateful V’s brilliant mind really encourages a focused, but super fun and open space at the same time. 

Because of our schedules and setups, we did a ton of closed edit sessions together at the Durham Public Library, to whom we give props. It is one of the best places in Durham, NC, IMO. 

Victoria: I echo everything Pilar said! We felt really connected with each other the entire time. We definitely want to do more work together! We also had the luxury of time to plan a focused story and shoot based on the project’s parameters, which is not something afforded in a straight-up documentary style. I loved that we all, including Lauren, could feel part of the decision making process with visuals. That synergy, trust and encouragement we gave each other helped me step out of my usual “narrative” mode and dig into and develop creative, more weird ideas with a group of badass, brilliant women.

Making Waves by Pilar Timpane and Victoria Bouloubasis:

VOTE for this film until September 30th here!

I wish______.

Pilar: I wish that the work women are doing on local and global levels to support each other, and our world, will be made visible and recognized. 

Victoria: I wish for everyone to be GUARANTEED basic human rights: housing, food, healthcare and pleasure. No questions asked.

Special Thanks to Teacup Productions for sponsoring this post.