YURI ALVESYuri Alves has dreamed of making movies since he could remember. Yuri was born in 1983, and moved to New Jersey along with his Portuguese parents, Victor and Sonia, and brother, Igor, in 1987. Yuri attended elementary school in Ironbound, an ethnic neighborhood of Newark and later completed high school in the neighboring town of Kearny. At Kearny High School, Alves began experimenting with his family’s new video camera in surprisingly impressive ways. Until then, he had limited himself to “directing” his action figures using his eye as the camera. Toys gave way to friends for the starring roles, and Yuri learned to shoot, record, and edit on a Sony Handicam. When Alves was sixteen, he began experimenting with brief fictional narratives. His initial short movies included an adaptation of Oedipus Rex, an interpretation of a Holocaust tale, and a Halloween horror spoof. Alves advanced his ambitions with the provocative Fatal Reaction, a dramatic account of events at a high school in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings. The following year, he completed Until the End, the tragic story of two best friends torn apart by drugs. Alves captured his school’s emotional experience during the week following the World Trade Center attacks in The Day the World Changed. Perhaps as powerful as the work was the screening: the twelve-minute documentary was projected to a school audience of more than 2000 people at his school on September 18, 2001. In his senior year, and still without a single film class, Alves’s desire to produce a longer narrative materialized into the one-year production of The Hitman (40 min). The movie follows the troubled Xavier, a contract killer who acts out his deliberate revenge against his former boss. The title character would surface again in a “prequel” intended to be decidedly different in tone and content, resulting in Alves’s first feature length movie: Xavier. Xavier is a hauntingly intense narrative of a newlywed mechanic who incurs the traumatic loss of his wife at the hands of local thugs. The grieving Xavier unsuccessfully attempts to assume an alternate existence, only to follow that frustration with the pursuit of a darker course of revenge. In 2005, Alves departed from his narrative orientation in creating an abstract and introverted short film titled Beyond the Origins Within. Alves’s has recently completed Jersey Blues (34 min) about a Jersey slacker who faces the reality of imminent fatherhood. Yuri Alves has earned awards and distinction for several of his films, including Until the End, The Day the World Changed, Beyond the Origins Within, Jersey Blues and Xavier. He is currently finishing his degree in Media Arts at New Jersey City University and working on a short action film, Chronicles of a Hitman. Yuri lives in Lyndhurst, New Jersey with his family.
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