Mike Cuenca is a self-taught underground filmmaker and musician.
Cuenca’s first feature-length film is Scenes from Oblivion, a youth-in-quarrel/semi-comic drama reflecting his Cuban-American upbringing and love of punk rock music. Scenes from Oblivion was made on a shoestring budget. He is also the creator of punks, mods and rockers web Series Oblivion which he co-writes, edits, produces, directs and acts in. He is also developing an “untitled black & white kitchen sink movie about sex and comic books” which he hopes to film within a span of 5 years to have the actors age in real-time.
As of 2011 Cuenca has taken a break from Oblivion to focus on a set of three loosely connected black and white movies, the first which is now in production under the title NON COMPOS MENTIS or: Jerry Powell & The Delusions of Grandeur. The second film titled The Death Loneliness will begin filming in November with the third, and currently untitled, to begin production in early January. The three movies are being shot by Los Angeles and New York based photographer Amberlie Bankoff.
Cuenca’s growing body of work addresses such themes as personal identity and freedom, absurdist philosophy, and punk ideology with a dose of slapstick. He cites his major influences as Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, the Marx Bros, and the French New Wave.
