If Raul Barcelona ever believed in omens, he got a surefire one in 2001 telling him to switch careers.
That year he had a job interview with a NASA contractor in Houston, Texas, to put his electrical engineering degree to good use.
The date: Sept. 11.
After the tragic events that morning he called his interviewer to see if his appointment was still on.
“The interview did go on as planned,” Barcelona said by phone. “I don’t think (the interviewer) was focused. I really wasn’t, either.”
By the time the company called him five months later to offer him the job Barcelona was in New York to fulfill his dream of being a filmmaker.
His first film, a documentary titled “The Promise of New York,” will show at the River’s Edge Film Festival this weekend.
Barcelona said his work follows three independent candidates vying for legitimacy and a chance to become New York mayor in 2005.
“My goals were never to make a political film,” Barcelona said about his project that took a year to shoot and two years to edit and produce.
As he followed a blogger, school teacher and a locally popular agitator in their quest to be more than outcasts, Barcelona said an interesting tale of how elections really work sprouted up.
“I think there’s a lot of the process of an election that we’re never told about in the media,” he said.
“We are told constantly we live in a land where everyone has opportunity and everyone has a voice. But every election is about two candidates who don’t represent the political and cultural diversity of the country.”
His outsider take on the election process comes in part from being born in Spain, moving to Italy as a teenager and then landing in Texas close to high school graduation.
He said his moving around also led to his artistic drive.
“When I moved to Italy I had a hard time communicating with people because I didn’t speak the language,” he said.
Barcelona went from being an outgoing, top student to quiet by lack of vocabulary. The feeling followed him to America.
“Expressing myself through art became a way I could connect with people,” he said.
Cartoons and film became his outlet while his parents insisted on him attending college and getting an engineering degree.
He got the degree but missed out on the desire.
In 2002 he hightailed it to New York to earn his stripes in the art world and start making his films.
This weekend he most looks forward to talking with the audience and getting feedback.
The fact that his film is first up Friday on the first full day of the festival doesn’t bother him, either.
It might even be a good omen.
Adam Shull can be
contacted at 575-8653.
