F  L  A  U  N  T

Somewhere on a playground, a child is yanking a wilted dandelion from the cement, blowing out every last white wispy, and making a wish. To pursue dreams in a new country? To be an actor in movies? To become a musician who writes and performs original pieces? Whatever one might hope for or envision, in Brooklyn, Julián De La Chica is witnessing his dandelion seeds grow into beautiful flowers.

But the trek to New York wasn’t a simple one. Once upon a time, De La Chica was just a kid with ambitions. It started in Manizales, Colombia. Surrounded by a music-loving family, it didn’t take long for him to start playing music. At five-years-old, he began taking piano lessons, and now—a couple decades later and the often complex emigration to NYC—if you Google search his name, you’ll see it stamped with the titles composer, record producer, pianist, music producer, or the newest one tacked onto the list: director. But De La Chica chooses not to box himself in with a label. “I don’t believe in labels,” he says, as we begin our conversation about his new film, Agatha, a story of immigrant displacement in NYC of which he stars in and composed. “I just go straight to doing things, whatever they are.”

No matter the label, what De La Chica does is create an experience—a piece of work skillfully crafted—whether it’s classical, hip-hop, electronic, or ambient. In July, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, he released his first symphony, a reflection of what De La Chica calls a composer’s “lonely” life and what a symphony can be. “My first symphony was supposed to be for a symphony orchestra, but I decided not to wait anymore and instead to arrange it for 14 keyboards. And that exercise was like asking myself, ‘What does it even mean to compose a symphony today?’ For me, it was so interesting to try to do something different, without all the traditional rules. The concept of ‘symphony’ is ultimately just the sounds together creating some kind of harmony.”

Continuing to break new boundaries for himself during these less than traditional times, De La Chica conceptualized Agatha, a story inspired by his own experience moving to New York, characterized in the tagline printed across the film poster: “In a city full of people, loneliness is the only companion.” De La Chica shares that the genesis for the film, as you might expect, grew from music. “I am a composer,” he affirms, “and that was actually the beginning of the story of Agatha, it was the music. I believe my music is deeply connected to imagery. All my past compositions are related to images and about what they portray, which is different from other composers that sit in front of the piano and create a lot of music. For me it’s the situation that’s important, the imagery about whatever I had in mind when I composed the piece, so it was not complicated for me to make the connection to film. I love all kinds of experiments.”

The experiment of 2020 is certainly extraordinary, and the loneliness and displacement in Agatha may have more resonance this year with audiences than any period in recent memory. Having already been selected to screen at over twenty film festivals, there doesn’t seem to be much Julián De La Chica cannot do. With a second film and a new electronic project already in the works, it would seem that the kid on the playground in Manizales plucked and wished upon a rather bountiful dandelion.

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Written by Audra McClain

Photographed by Zach Gross

Styled by Brandon Garr