Meet the Founder
Dr. Vanessa V. Rodriguez Vargas
PsyaD, LMHC, MCCS (she/her)
Founder and C.E.O.
“I wanted to create a space where a clinician, a novelist, and a physicist could all talk about the same film and disagree, while valuing philosophical opposition.”
Dr. Rodriguez founded Filmanalytic out of a simple frustration: the most interesting conversations about films were happening in fragments — in clinical rooms, seminar corridors, even walks to the MBTA — but never in the same place at the same time.
Her vision was to create an intellectually magnanimous space: one where expertise is offered rather than performed, where disagreement is hospitality, and where a person with no academic training can ask the question that will delightfully reframe the whole evening. As a result, "Filmanalytic" was born. It aims to emphasize the value of each film is not about being considered "good" or "bad" for the audience, it is more so reliant on the analysis of the induction, or elicited reaction.
She started an Instagram account, @Filmanalytic, in 2023 while writing her dissertation on the intersection of psychoanalysis, film, and existentialism. Dr. Rodriguez used it as a means of exploring the dynamic of the objective transference and countertransference; the interpersonal narrative that is being told in the film. In the hopes of acknowledging the impact that subjective transference and countertransference has on the same film; how one's own personal history, and positionality can, and will, influence the subjective interpretation of any given film.
As curator, she will select each film, invites the panelists, and shaping the arc of the night — the screening, the discussion, the table. Her aim is not to teach cinema but to use it: as the most reliable way to get a group of strangers to talk honestly about the ubiquity and idiosyncrasies of humanity.
The inaugural evening is currently in development. Those on the mailing list will hear about the first film, the first panel and the first room before anyone else.