On the Outs: Behind the scenes with Paola Mendoza
By: Navani Otero

What started as a college rebellion has led Paola Mendoza to the big screen, not only as an actress, but a writer as well. Unsatisfied with the theater department at UCLA because all the stories focused on white men, Paola decided she would rebel. Rebellion meant writing and directing her own theatre for the smaller stages on campus. It was there she found her voice and more importantly, the stories she wanted to tell. "For people that are struggling and don't have the opportunity to tell their story - I feel like it's my obligation to tell their stories for them." Paola explains.

Her passion is evident in On the Outs, a film she both co-wrote and starred in. She tells us the story of Marisol, a seventeen year old fighting her demons as a drug addict while still trying to cope with her responsibilities as a mother. Dork Magazine was able to catch up with Paola Mendoza and find out what it took to get the voices of these young women portrayed accurately, and why it was so crucial to get their story told:

DM: Not only do you act in the film On the Outs, you co-created it. How did the idea for the movie come to be?

P: My partners and I, Michael Skolnik and Lori Silverbush, we wanted to tell a story about young people. We’ve each worked with young people for numerous amounts of years and it is personally my passion. But we weren’t sure what the story was we wanted to tell. It wasn’t until we saw a documentary called Girlhood by Liz Vargas that we realized this was the story we wanted to tell. When we saw the documentary it was basically a story about two girls that were locked up in a juvenile detention center, in Oklahoma, and it followed their lives for three years. What was the epiphany about this film, is that we realized this story about girls getting locked and are locked up is not being told. This is a story you haven’t seen and that was what attracted us to it, and it’s a story that needed to be told.

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