Alex Peña's Chronovisor premieres at MoMA's New Directors/New Films festival
Alex Peña (Mexico City, 1996), a graduate in architecture from Universidad Iberoamericana, made a leap to New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as the production designer behind Chronovisor (2026, Kevin Walker, Jack Auen), a film selected for screening at the museum's New Directors/New Films festival on April 10 and 11.
For Peña, architecture is a way to imagine stories, spaces, and places, which led him to focus his career on theater and film set design. "In architecture, when you work on a project, you can envision all kinds of things—no matter how unusual—but they're often constrained by budgets and production regulations. In film, that's not always the case. Ultimately, I was more interested in storytelling," Peña explains in an interview.
The architect recounts how Kevin Walker introduced him to the Chronovisor script, which tells the story of a device created by monks—known as the chronovisor—that allows its user to see the past.
"It's a work of fiction where I drew inspiration from minimalist spaces, environments that don't distract, so you can focus on the character. The film relies heavily on graphics, books, and the protagonist's research, and that came from the architectural knowledge I gained at Ibero in Mexico. The questions I explored in my own research are the ones I brought to life in the film," he says.
Peña adds that part of the production design also reinforced the psychological construction of the main character. "Everything is designed to serve that obsession, that way of life."
Though he now works on major productions for platforms like Netflix and Apple TV, Alex Peña aspires to follow the path of auteur cinema.
