Javier Campos has been working in the audiovisual industry for almost 20 years. In 2006, he began editing the documentary film El Varal (2009), directed by Marta Ferrer, which went on to win Best Documentary Film of the 2010 Morelia Film festival. Since then, Javier has edited 16 documentary films, in addition to a handful of Mexican television series. All of these films have been shown in festivals around the world including TRIBECA, TIFF, FIDOCS Chile, Antenna Documentary Film Festival de Sydney, DOKfest Muchen, and HOTDOCS Toronto. In 2019, he also produced a short documentary film by Pablo Tamez entitled They are somewhere in 2019.  Two of his edited films, Apart and The Years of Fierro, were nominated for an Ariel in 2014 and 2015 respectively (the Ariels is the Mexican equivalent of the Academy Awards). His most recently released film, The Guardian of Memory, won the 2020 Ariel Award for Best Documentary Feature.

 

Javier Campos graduated with a degree in Communications in 2002, but he has been fascinated by cinema from a very young age. As a kid he rented bootleg Betamax tapes of Hollywood hits from a neighbor in his small town outside of Mexico City. In documentary cinema, he discovered the potential of editing to construct arguments and messages with attention to emotional and aesthetic connection with viewers. While documentary film generates conversations that can lead to concrete change regarding the problems that afflict our societies, it is also a tool for collective reflection that preserves the historical memory of individuals. My influences are varied: the cinema of Errol Morris for its constant questioning without a search for absolute truth, the cinema of Tatiana Huezo for its aesthetic commitment, the cinema of Stanley Kubrick for its ambiguity and symmetry. I am inspired by Lynch's surrealism and Herzog's hyper-rationalized stance.