We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sol Gray. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sol below.

Sol, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I have a love-hate relationship with humanity. I am often amazed by the extraordinary things we can achieve and awestruck by the purity of raw emotions we can feel. But I’m also often disturbed by how this great human capacity is utilized to cause others pain. It is unsettling to see how those you love can do so much wrong. I came to understand that this is usually caused by a lack of introspection and communication, preventing empathy. We can create mental barriers – or borders – often invisible or unquestioned – that divide people and give rise to emotional and physical harm. Idealist by nature, I habitually challenge myself to at least question all sorts of borders that exist around us because I believe that change in the world starts from within. Now I’ve determined that I need to push the world to do it too.
My understanding of the world emerged from the peculiar dynamics of where I was born. I lived in Juarez, Mexico but went to school in El Paso, USA, crossing back and forth every day over an invisible line drawn across a single organism – two conjoined cities that many don’t understand are actually one in many ways. Later, I realized that the border was not imaginary at all when my eyes were opened to the mistreatment border patrol officers would commonly inflict on Mexicans, versus my other friends in school. To my younger self this was confusing: we looked the same, we spoke the same languages, we had families in both cities — but we were not the same. On top of this, by the time I was eight, drug trafficking was rising. I tried to understand why I would hear gunshots in the middle of parties and my father’s friend got abducted for a ransom. You would also hear about murdered women (often for their perceived taking of border-fueled jobs from men) and see pink crosses around the city, where the corpses had been discarded. ‘Femicides’, as the local news anchor would call them. Although I love Juarez, my hometown made me aware of the ugly parts of humanity. My parents overprotected me for my safety – resulting in a life where I couldn’t go to many places or hang out with friends outside school. This was multiplied by their extreme Catholic views and further multiplied by the violence in my family. Naturally, as the oldest child, I tried to play the peacemaker, getting two sides to understand each other. But in general, it was better to stay quiet than to say much.
Though I was a quiet girl, I was a close observer. I had always felt miscomprehended and ignored, and I knew I did not want anybody to feel how I felt. I wanted to see everybody. I was obsessed with understanding what every little quirk, clothing choice, and small action would say about a person and what was truly meant and felt behind what they would say. I began to imagine little stories that would reveal a character’s nature, and how they came to be through the small things they had and did, every detail having a purpose. From a young age, I enjoyed storytelling in many mediums. I had instinctively understood each of the arts I studied as a language with its own syntax and semantics, with its own quirky idioms and patterns of usage.
As I grew up in a very enclosed childhood and adolescence, many were surprised when I made the very unusual choice to do college not in Mexico, not even in the US, but in China. By the age of 18, I strangely had no doubt that my next step in life was to bust through the borders of my enclosed reality as much as I could imagine and move to Shanghai – learning the Chinese culture, language, and political dynamics with other territories such as Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Throughout college, I immersed myself in dance at a deeper and more formal level. Dance fascinated me because communicating in its language, one without words, often seemed less obvious, more abstract. My other main art throughout college was street photography — I liked the concept of capturing moments that would never exist again, and documenting places in a point in time. On the side I also began working in video editing, and comprehending how the order and timing in which I connected shots could affect what I wanted to transmit. After college, I wanted to explore studio photography, for the challenge of crafting a single image that could tell an entire story. As assistant to one of the top NY fashion photographers, Udo Spreitzenbarth, I have already been fortunate enough to work with celebrities, and even have my images appear on a billboard in Times Square. Ultimately, I understood that the culmination to all the things I learned and the change I wanted to do in the world was within film. My extensive time in dance, photography, and video editing (and in adolescence, piano and drawing) led to my interest in the meta-aspects of creative languages – which are better or worse for communicating different things, and how they could even work together in new ways. I see film as the ultimate medium, with the potential to draw upon all the other creative languages.
Because I grew up with a heightened awareness of borders — and invisible barriers of all kinds, especially those that closed one’s mind – their arbitrariness, sometimes unfairness, and the many quiet but deep side effects they can have – I want to challenge spectators to see more deeply. Throughout life I have been a peacemaker, disturbed by the idea of people being so enclosed in their own trains of thought that it can go as far as creating harm to others. I want to challenge spectators through storytelling that makes them think, forcing them to self-analyze and maybe even be disgusted by their own extreme thoughts. In this current geopolitical context with two new wars, this is perhaps more timely to address than ever. Art should not always be beautiful. I want to help humanity by showing humanity to itself, both beautiful and ugly. Those are the films I want to make. I want to cause a shake in viewers by showing them an ugliness or another side of something they may not have seen before, that provokes introspection about how they mentally digest things, and the decisions and actions they can take that harm others and why they take them. I am drawn to revisit some of the original ideas of surrealism in cinema, which often intended to cause discomfort through the symbolism of grotesque imagery. Before you deeply see another viewpoint, your reality is your mental prison – a set of interlocking walls that can form one hard-to-penetrate structure. I’d like to challenge viewers’ reality with this kind of imagery. I now see barriers of the mind everywhere and have the desire to hear and see anyone that seemed possibly unheard or unseen.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, I was fortunate to grow up at the intersection of two cultures, with Juárez, Mexico just across the border. This early exposure to diverse perspectives sparked a lifelong passion for understanding people — a skill that has consistently shaped both my artistic work and professional journey.
Throughout my life, I’ve had the privilege of living across multiple continents, including Asia, Europe, and the Americas. These experiences have taught me the importance of adaptability, curiosity, and embracing new ways of thinking.
Today, I channel these insights into my core mission: to help stories translate their values into compelling visual pieces, designed to resonate across modern audiences.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Coming from a background in social media advertising — an industry often defined by limited budgets — I quickly learned the importance of versatility. In order to bring projects to life, I frequently assumed multiple roles, serving as producer, creator, videographer, editor, and VFX artist to meet client expectations. This necessity to work with lean teams allowed me to develop a broad skill set that has proven invaluable across a variety of creative and professional challenges.

In recent years, I’ve transitioned from commercial content to narrative filmmaking, where larger crews and specialized roles are the standard. This shift has deepened my understanding of one of the most essential elements of filmmaking: collaboration.

While the fast-paced, hands-on nature of content creation sharpened both my technical and interpersonal abilities, it also limited my growth in one critical area — the ability to communicate a creative vision effectively and, above all, to delegate. I became fully aware of this during my first project as a director, which marked the first time I entrusted another editor with shaping the final cut. Placing that level of trust in a collaborator was a greater challenge than I had anticipated, but it was also one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

It was through this process that I came to appreciate the true power of collaboration — the ability of fresh perspectives to elevate a project beyond what any single creator could achieve alone. In hindsight, I wish I had embraced this fundamental aspect of filmmaking much earlier in my journey.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Since transitioning into narrative filmmaking, I’ve found that every story I create or help bring to life is anchored by a recurring theme: loneliness. At the heart of each project lies a deep exploration of isolation — of characters who, in one way or another, feel like outsiders.

This focus is deeply personal. For many years, loneliness was a constant companion in my own life. During those times, what I longed for most wasn’t necessarily connection, but understanding. I believe storytelling, at its core, has the extraordinary power to offer just that.

Roger Ebert once described cinema as “a machine that generates empathy.” It’s a sentiment that defines my relationship with filmmaking. The beauty of a film lies not in whether the audience shares the same background, appearance, or voice as the character on screen, but in the shared emotional journey — the quiet recognition of a feeling that makes us feel seen, even in the darkest moments.

For me, filmmaking is more than a craft or career. It is my way of offering connection to others — of making the world feel, if only for a moment, a little less lonely.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://marigallardo.com
• Instagram: @wongkarwifi
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marisol-gallardo/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@wongkarwifi

Image Credits

Photo credits: Sol Gallardo