In downtown Vista, the Film Hub offers a glimpse of North County’s creative future: filmmakers finding collaborators, making their work and helping younger storytellers discover their voices.
Vista City Councilmember Jeff Fox knows a film needs more than a camera. Through Star Fox Media and his work at the Film Hub, he brings a producer’s sense of how an idea becomes a finished project. Fox’s roots in the San Diego film scene reach back to Princebury Productions and its tradition of story-driven films for broad audiences.
Chris Soriano, a former Marine and Asian American filmmaker, is part of that community. His feature “ABG: Asian Baby Girl” asks who gets to be seen on screen. Growing up around San Diego, he wondered why he had not seen stories about women like those at its center. “They are stigmatized,” he said. “How can we use that?”
“My primary objective is putting more of our Asian American stories out there,” Soriano told me. “We’re usually in the background.” He described ABG as his seventh feature-length film, shot in about 15 days. Hillary Soriano served as an executive producer and appears in a supporting role.
The production unfolded through personal loss: Soriano’s father died in March. Caring for him, grieving him and completing a film meant relying on people who kept showing up, including old classmates and fellow veterans.
One young filmmaker learning from that example is Christian Wagari, a North County student and The Coast News intern photographer. Waitlisted at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, Christian spent a year sharpening his skills: writing essays, telling stories through photography and completing his debut short, “A Good Christian.”
Wagari had already spent a sophomore summer interning with Fox’s Star Fox Media.
“Chris Soriano is a mentor,” Wagari says. “Jeff Fox introduced me to him, and I’ve been using his blueprint for my own film.”
“A Good Christian” follows young people navigating isolation and AI, then finding connection through nature and one another. Wagari cites Damien Chazelle’s “Whiplash” as an influence. He also draws inspiration from Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s experiment in premium short-form entertainment.
Wagari imagines films with the care given to features: strong performances, clean cinematography and a complete story, whatever its running time.
His first priority is “A Good Christian” and the possibilities within its world: a series of shorts and an expanded, longer treatment. Rooted in the pressures shaping his generation, the film gives young people space to tell their own stories about isolation, identity and connection.
“High school students need opportunities to show the world as they experience it,” Wagari says. “I want ‘a good christian’ to inspire viewers, offer insight and help us find one another.”
Beyond that foundation, he is developing an ambitious slate of creative concepts: “The Gold Coast,” centered on Victory & Noble’s original characters Santiago and Bender; “A Quarter ’til the Renaissance,” a Paris-set short exploring Black cinema, global imagination and a generation coming of age amid profound change, for which he hopes to approach Denzel and John David Washington; “Miyagi,” a manga-inspired exploration of the origins of the “Karate Kid” mentor; and “Shariki,” a Wagari International concept reimagining his childhood alter ego, SharkHeart, through manga.
These remain projects in development, not announced productions.
Fox sees opportunity beyond the projects themselves. He says this “renaissance amongst our young creatives” intersects with film incentives and the effort to bring production outside Los Angeles.
The details matter: federal Section 181 generally applies to qualifying productions that began before 2026, while California’s current program has a $1 million minimum budget for independent features and specific incentives tied to eligible work outside the Los Angeles zone.
Those provisions will not fund every student short, but they give North County filmmakers reason to think about the production economy they may enter.
That wider outlook also informs Nicole Hernandez’s vision for Nexus: a cross-border meeting place for cultures expressed through music and film. Christian was energized by the opening of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. He jokes that its building might conceal a cockpit bound for outer space, then points to Lucas, Spielberg, De Palma and Coppola as filmmakers who once began with ideas and peers.
Wagari’s creative network includes Nicole Hernandez-Colin, founder of NEXUS, whose October 10 film festival at the Fleet Science Center celebrated San Diego filmmakers. Although he couldn’t attend, he plans to connect with her after the festival to explore film and collaboration — extending “A Good Christian” into the local creative community it reflects.
Patrick A. Howell is CEO of Global Market Intelligence & Media (GMIQ) and author of “Getting Deals Done: The Memoirs of a Super Achiever in the Era of Apex Capitalism.” Howell also hosts the “Getting Deals Done” podcast, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music and other major platforms. Contact him at [email protected].
EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been updated from its original version.
