about
Photo by sean@purplephoto.co // © 2024
Jim is an award-winning, Filipino-American filmmaker whose work frequently explores heartache, longing, liminality, eros, and pathos. He’s been named one of Newcity's FILM 50 of 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2024—alongside such production notables as Dick Wolf (Law & Order), The Wachowskis (The Matrix Saga), and Steve James (Hoop Dreams). He is a 2021 3Arts “Make a Wave” grantee, and grand award winner of the inaugural NewNarratives Program from NewFilmmakers LA and WarnerMedia OneFifty.
His original feature script, Sunny Days, received excellent coverage from Electric City Entertainment (Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines) and OddLot Entertainment (Drive, Ender's Game), while The Black List called it: “a beautifully written, complex character study with a bewitching atmosphere...evaluated purely on the depth, artfulness, and insight of its writing, [it] is better than the vast majority of scripts.”
Jim's psychological horror short, Violets, which reframes the genre's more common predator/prey dynamic, received the 22nd Chicago Underground Film Festival's Audience Award. His follow up, Library Hours, is a reimagined approach to vintage erotica that favors empathy over objectification, and stylistic purpose over the male gaze. Reviewing its sold-out West Coast Premiere at HBO's Outfest LA, one critic wrote, “The material in the hands of a lesser writer or director could have been exploitative, sexually gratuitous and even insensitive, but under Jim Vendiola [it] is anything but.”
His latest short, Pretty Pickle—part horror, part comedy of manners, and part romance—made thirty-five festival stops in thirteen months, and is currently available online exclusively through Directors Notes. The film had its International Premiere at Fantasia, its West Coast Premiere at HollyShorts, won “Best Short Narrative” at Chicago Underground Film Festival, and was awarded “Best Midnight/WTF Short” at GenreBlast. Morbidly Beautiful calls it "sexy, subversive, and truly stunning," while Boston Hassle says it’s “a deeply disturbing little piece of cinema—a raw, haunting short that will gnaw at you long after it’s over.”
Jim’s upcoming, neo-noir limited series, Argus (co-created with LeLe Park), is currently in development with WarnerMedia OneFifty.