Culture is a term I use to describe a group of characteristics that a particular community shares. A sometimes abstract representation of the community's sense of identity. A social protocol.

It's hard to pin down all characteristics that define a culture because all cultures don't have exactly the same particular trait divergence and because the study of culture cannot be limited to a social study. Culture dialectically implies an overlapping and internal dynamic of the different reflections on the life of groups of individuals, their environment, their history and their thoughts . However some major ones are very common and I will try to explore them a bit.

Language is universal to all groups of people co-existing. Without language there is no communication and the complexity of a human community is reduced to the simplicity of an animal herd.

The arts are another factor that often can express identity. The creative process is always influenced by the auteur who often is very influenced by his environment and experience. Indirectly, traits of a communal idea will end up in a work of art made by an individual who transports it onto the piece of art itself.

Religion is almost necessary for a culture to exist. Religion often gives common ground rules of interaction by defining reality. It creates a set of morals and allows people to make sense out of their direction and place in a community. Even the dogma associated with many religions could function as an interface between generations because it is important for a culture to continue to spread in younger generations. If the younger generation didn't learn the cultural conventions they would not fit properly in the social structure and could potentially destroy a culture.

Something that often goes unnoticed when trying to understand an individual's culture is the social organization in his community. This structure defines whether an individual's relationship to another should be competitive or cooperative. It defines peoples expectations and it will have a major impact in the construction of an individual's identity.

Behaviors often shape cultures in many ways. Even lacking a complex language, animals manage to live in groups and benefit from each other to a point. The way they manage to do this is by observing and reacting. So in a way a behavior can contain a cultural message. Again, a behavior will also overlap with other traits in a culture. For example, not only can a child learn to paint from his father, but he will also learn how often he should paint and how important painting is in his life from his father's painting habits. Food, which in my opinion is very important to defining a culture not only can be considered an artistic expression but it also provides nutrition that physically determines what the health and body of individuals in a community will be. Because it is a universal need for all humans food can even establish communication between individuals both within a culture or between cultures. For example, my grandma used to cook big meals that were very hard for a small child like me to finish but still she would feel insulted if I or someone else didn't finish the whole meal because in a way, for her it symbolized a rejection to an expression of affection. People outside of our culture, like foreign visitors would never understand this and leave their meal half eaten without intention to hurt her feelings because this particular behavior functions as a symbol; a sign that has a meaning that must be learned, and that language artifact was particular to our culture. Culture could be analyzed semiotically as a system of symbols particular to a group of people.

Today humanity is going through a mass communication revolution and this is also shaping cultures. Tools like TV or Internet have forced a clash of cultures or in some cases it's had the ability to change culture and homogenize people in different geographical locations. Some worry about this phenomena. I personally feel confident that mass media is just another human tool and if anything it will find its position in a place that will unite the human race beyond physical limitations. It will take a while but I have no doubt it will happen because we are after all very much social beings.

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I was born in 1983 in a middle class family in the north coast of Colombia. I was the first child of a young couple of married professionals and later a brother to a sister 4 years younger than me and a brother 8 years younger than me. I was baptized catholic with my fathers name, a common practice in latin america that could be though of as a metaphor for the cyclical and hopeless attitude of the society I grew up in. In my culture education is so precious that if someone has the opportunity to attend college that opportunity automatically transforms into a responsibility. Both my parents worked and I spent a great deal of my childhood under the care of a nanny or a maid. In my adolescence it became more and more clear that my responsibility as a son was to study. I never worked in Colombia. I never had to because my parents could provide for me and it's a popular informal policy that if you are born in a family who can afford to send you to college, it would be a waste of precious study time to even hold a job before graduation.

When I was 3 or so, my dad signed me up for music classes at a music conservatory. I was placed in an experimental pedagogical program to teach music to kids from a very early age. My music studies were draining for me at the time. I had to go to the conservatory every Saturday and sometimes even during the week after school. I vividly remember how badly I wish I could stay home and watch Saturday morning cartoons. I learned music theory, vocal performance, I learned to play the flute, violin and viola and even got to play with the conservatory's orchestra in many occasions.

The most extraordinary thing that happened around that time besides missing Saturday morning cartoons was when my father bought a PC for the house in 1989, when he came back from completing a graduate degree in St. Louis. It was the first family I knew of who had a PC. The great majority of people in Colombia at the time probably didn't even know what a PC was or why you'd want to use one. I feel very fortunate to have been able to familiarize myself with computers from such an early age. My dad even paid for an Internet connection for the PC. There was only one Internet service provider in Colombia at the time, Compuserve, which was actually not located in my city but in Bogota so everytime we got online via phone we had to also pay for the long distance charges in the phone bill. I became very proficient with computers and learned to code simple programs and build computers from scratch just for the fun of it.

When I was old enough to contradict my parents, I told my dad I wanted to quit music school. He was very upset about it because he had made such an effort to give me the chance he didn't have, but I was simply fed up with it and didn't seem to enjoy it anymore. A few months after that I started learning to play the guitar on my own by asking friends and with the basic music theory I had learned. My dad said he wasn't very happy about me playing the guitar because everyone he met who played the guitar in high school seemed to fail and not graduate. I was always a top student but my grades gradually started to slip when I was around 13. In high school I was very social. I went to school at the same Presbyterian institution from Kindergarten to high school graduation with the same class mates from day 1. That allowed me to make a few very good friends. I was very happy in high school. I started a punk and ska band with some friends where I sang and played the guitar. We played a lot of Green Day and Sublime covers, even though this type of music was not popular at all at the time and place. My social life was perfect, most people liked me and I felt very confident to explore my new feelings during my teen age years. It was more socially acceptable to drink from an early age in Colombia. I remember starting drinking and going to dance parties late at night since as early as age 13. Salsa, passion and loud home-made P.A. Systems; it felt like I was predetermined to go live it. I was very involved in many extra curricular activities at school. I was particularly interested in becoming a leader. I ran for student government representative since my first day of high school and won my classmates vote all the way to my senior year when I became school president. I got very good grades in subjects that didn't require homework and not so well in subjects that required homework. My parents were constantly called in by my teachers to be told not that I was doing horribly but that I could be doing better but for some reason I wasn't. I didn't give the problem much thought.

On my senior year of high school my father got a letter from the American consulate to inform him that a permanent resident visa he requested over 10 years ago had finally been approved. On 2001 at age 17. I figured it would be the best plan to go to college in America. American schools had better reputation and offered more diverse majors or areas of study. The problem with high education in Colombia was that the only people really making money after college were Engineers (electrical, civil, mechanic...), lawyers and doctors. I kinda wanted to do something creative for a living instead. I decided to attend college in St. Louis with the goal of earning an Audio Production major and recording my own music with more control. Right after I arrived in May 2001, I got my first job at McDonald's. I hated having to work but here in America people my aged seemed to be a lot more independent mostly because they worked for their own money. In fact, I was making more money working as a McDonald's cashier than my dad did in Colombia working as a civil engineer with international graduate studies. I pretty much had to work because of that alone. It never really even crossed my mind to have $2000, I had a hard time trying to find something to spend it on. I bought a pair of roller skates and the coolest video camera I could afford with my very first salary.

My new life in America was too different. I had no friends and I felt like people would rather not associate with me because I was different in culture and looks, not to mention because my English was really bad even despite the fact that I took English in school since Kindergarten. I got very sad and by the end of that very same year I just couldn't take it anymore and took a trip back to Colombia. I was hopping it would “feel” exactly the same as since I left but it wasn't. My friends were more busy with college now, some were very serious and didn't feel like partying too much and the worst part was that it seemed like the gap I thought I had left in my acquaintances lives was not a gap at all. My best friends had new best friends. My ex-girlfriend from 3 years had a new boyfriend, my cousins were already leaping into their 30's and didn't feel like doing the same “kid stuff” they used to do just a few months ago with me.

I enjoyed my vacation but never went back to Colombia ever since, mostly because with college I never got the time or the money again. As soon as I returned to America I went to a psychologist to try and make sense out of myself and I was diagnosed with a chronic type of depression called Dysthymia and Attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADHD), which explained why my grades were slowly going down as my ADHD developed more and more. Around the same time I realized I had more of a bigger passion that I thought for films. I guess in Colombia films and movie theaters are not as popular as they are here and people don't think about films that critically but my new American perspective on film made me decide to move to Chicago to attend film school. At the beginning it looked like I might had been able to return to my glory days in high school when I was so happy. Within months of moving to Chicago I already had a couple of friends and was dating a nice girl. I loved Chicago. I loved walking, the train, the new professional horizon of my filmmaking career. My film education wasn't exactly what I expected. Columbia College's film department was very much oriented to the technical aspect of filmmaking and I was interested mostly in the theoretical aspect of it. I struggled with that and learned to appreciate it and not see it as a limitation, but I believe this opposition catalyzed the development of my ability and tolerance for abstraction. As my movies got weirder and weirder my sense of identity also became very frustrating. Was I the happy Pablo living in Colombia? Or was I the depressed and isolated Pablo in St. Louis? Or maybe, was I Pablo the kid in making weird films in Chicago? Was I less Colombian now? Will I ever be American enough to live here? Should I be? I realized the answer to all questions was Yes. I am what I am but also what I have been. I decided that right after graduation I would go back to Colombia and shoot a movie there. Nothing has ever made more sense to me in my life and currently I'm trying to finish college and raise enough money to shoot the film. The thing I'm more glad for is that I don't get anxious about identity anymore, but a lesson was learned: we people can't define ourselves permanently “for the times, they are a-changin' ”