Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Mala Forever’s Jessie Levandov and Nina Reyes Rosenberg

Jessie Levandov and Nina Reyes Rosenberg are the creative masterminds behind Mala Forever, an award-winning, women-run film and digital studio focused on “unheard voices” and based in Los Angeles and New York City. Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to chat with both cofounders about starting Mala Forever.

PC: Tell us about yourselves and Mala Forever.
Mala Forever: Nina is a countercultural Xicana-Jewish filmmaker, writer, and artivist raised in San Francisco and based in Los Angeles. Jessie is a filmmaker, visual artist, creative director, and educator based in New York City. Together, we are Mala Forever.

Mala Forever is a creative lab and content platform for the radical femme revolution. We develop and produce original films, new media, and commissioned work that empowers and centers unheard voices.

PC: How did this partnership form? How did you both come up with the idea for Mala Forever?
Mala Forever: We met as film students at NYU fifteen years ago and since then have been creative partners working towards our vision for Mala Forever. We have always known that we wanted to build a studio dedicated to bringing diverse, bold, subversive feminist stories to screens large and small. Over the last decade, we have gained professional and executive experience in commercial, community, and independent film spaces that we are now applying to grow and scale Mala Forever.

PC: What has been the biggest challenge bringing Mala Forever to life?
Mala Forever: There is no template for building an anti-capitalist, hybrid multimedia production company such as we are. Our learning curve has been steep.

PC: What is the process like deciding which creators will be featured in the community?
Mala Forever: We open up our curation process with a call for submissions that we leave open with no restrictions on theme or content format. We then see which common threads emerge and work with selected artists to complete their vision, who are all at various stages of progress across many different mediums.

PC: You’ve released a few issues so far [of your magazine Mala Forever Presents]. What can readers expect from future issues?
Mala Forever: Readers have been responding to the raw, uncensored, diverse, and subversive nature of our magazine issues. We look forward to producing more collections of work around themes that often go unexplored in media and cultural establishment: capitalism and income inequality, holistic self-care, and presenting alternative voices in American politics.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

PC: Guilty pleasure TV show?
Nina: Empire

Jessie: RuPaul’s Drag Race

PC: Guilty pleasure movie?
Nina: Con Air

Jessie: 10 Things I Hate About You

PC: Favorite book?
Nina: Fiction: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison; nonfiction: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.

Jessie: Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

PC: Favorite play or musical?
Nina: Grease

Jessie: Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the book by Cheryl Strayed

PC: A band or artist that fans would be surprised to learn is on your playlist?
Nina: Ariana Grande

Jessie: Miguel

PC: Last show you binge-watched?
Nina: Euphoria

Jessie: Euphoria

PC: Hidden talent?
Nina: Singing and rapping. I can also spell the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” in under five seconds. (It’s the longest word in the dictionary.)

Jessie: I know all the words to almost every song that was on the radio in the ’90s.

To learn more about Mala Forever, visit their official website, and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.