My name is Freddy Noriega. In Mexico City born and raised, watching movies is where I spent most of my days.
I'm the son of a singer who was a pioneer of jazz in Mexico and a Cuban English teacher, who grew up in NY, and am brother of a respected jazz singer & musician. I sang with her for five years in a jazz vocal group, we recorded an album and got to open for guys like B.B.King, George Benson & Randy Brecker, so I'm very musically inclined (also, this explains why I find Whiplash so ridiculous).
My father played Herbie The Love Bug (68 original with Dean Jones & Buddy Hackett) on the ol' betamax when I was about 4 and I became addicted to movies. Geeky to the point of psychosis, walking IMDb syndrome.
The first editing I ever did was cutting movie music videos on vhs when I was about 12 (what the kids nowadays call "mashups" or "supercuts). A 12 year old movie geek's idea of fun (fuck soccer!).
Started working on movie sets around 15, getting the directors (a respected director from the golden age of Mexican movies & his son) coffee on set, by 20 I had good experience as P.A., A.D., & Location Managing on stuff from B-movies to documentary tv.
At some point, I tried the actor thing. Little bit of theatre and, for a while, I had an impersonation show (Spanish versions of DeNiro, Brando, Woody Allen, etc). Turned out my audience for that here was... limited.
Started cutting professionally about 14 years ago and I've cut everything from major (for Mexican standards) motion pictures, to music videos, to weddings (sometimes in that order). Fortunately, the last few years have seen me cutting more movies than not.
My first big movie was actor Julio Bracho's directing debut, Desafío, which is a type of Mexican Days of Thunder, NASCAR racing drama.
A documentary I cut about the life of boxer Juan Manuel Marquez (Libra X Libra) won an award at a sports documentary festival (I'm forgetting the name) and a film I cut last year (Xibalba) just won an award at the Yucatan Film Festival.
I’ve edited the teen comedy Malaventura, as well as that director’s first English language film, The Bad Guys, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival 2016.
I've also cut a bunch of videos & documentaries for the Kasparov Chess Foundation, yet, I still don't know a lick about chess.
And that's the story so far...
