Alejandra Amarilla Built an Award-Winning Film While Divorcing Steve Nash

Alejandra Amarilla spent six years building an award-winning documentary about a landfill orchestra in Paraguay. She built it across some of the same years she was fighting her ex-husband, NBA Hall of Famer Steve Nash, over custody of their three children in Arizona family court.

That documentary became Landfill Harmonic. For a long time before it existed, most people who recognized her name only knew it because she had been married to one of the best point guards in NBA history.

Quick Facts

Origins

Amarilla was born in Asuncion, Paraguay. Her father worked for the United Nations, and the family moved often when she was a child, which meant she grew up across several countries before eventually settling in New York City as an adult. She worked there for years as a personal trainer, a job with no obvious connection to Paraguay or documentary filmmaking.

She met Nash in Manhattan in 2001, while he was still playing for the Dallas Mavericks, years before his back to back MVP seasons with the Phoenix Suns. They started dating, and on October 14, 2004, Amarilla gave birth to twin daughters, Bella and Lola. She and Nash married on June 11, 2005.

2008

Three years into the marriage, Amarilla decided she wanted to make a documentary about underserved children in her home country. She brought the idea to a producer named Juliana Peñaranda Loftus.

That year, she also traveled to northern Uganda with a group called Athletes for Africa, working with former child soldiers, and supported a handful of other causes tied to children and poverty. She co-directed two documentaries for a nonprofit called Free Arts of Arizona, one of which, Every Child Matters, raised more than 70,000 dollars for the group. She also backed a microloan fund for women in Paraguay and helped fund a pediatric cardiology program there, so children could get heart care without traveling to Brazil for it.

2009 and 2010

Amarilla and Peñaranda Loftus traveled to Paraguay in 2009 to look for a subject. On one of the last days of the trip, someone mentioned a music teacher named Favio Chavez, who was working with children in Cateura, a community built around a landfill outside Asuncion. Chavez, along with a local luthier named Nicolas Gomez, known in Cateura as Don Cola, had been teaching those children to play instruments built from whatever the landfill produced: violins made from paint cans and pizza trays, a saxophone made from water pipes and bottle caps, a double bass shaped out of an old oil drum.

Amarilla and Peñaranda Loftus went back in 2010 to start filming. In November of that year, Amarilla gave birth to a third child, a son named Matteo. Nash announced their separation the same day, in a public statement calling it a bittersweet moment for the family.

2011 to 2013

The divorce was finalized in 2011. The following year, Nash was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, and Amarilla asked an Arizona court for permission to move their three children to Los Angeles so they could spend more time with their father. Nash opposed the move. His attorneys said the real reason was California’s more generous child support rules, not the children’s schedule.

An early trailer of the orchestra also went viral that October, and Amarilla’s team used the attention to fund the rest of the film through Kickstarter, raising more than 214,000 dollars from nearly 5,000 backers.

In May 2013, an attorney representing Nash stood in a Phoenix courtroom and read one of Amarilla’s emails to the judge, arguing it proved she wanted to move to California only to trigger a bigger child support payment. She denied it under oath. Two months later, in July 2013, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled against Nash, finding that a lower court had failed to properly weigh whether the children were entitled to keep the standard of living they had known while their parents were married. Amarilla’s attorney, Angela Hallier, released a statement afterward that included a line from her client: “This has been a long and difficult process and I’m relieved that this phase of it has been resolved.” Nash had reportedly paid Amarilla close to five million dollars in the original divorce settlement.

Four months after that ruling, in November 2013, CBS introduced the orchestra to American television audiences through a segment on 60 Minutes.

2014 to 2016

A flood hit Cateura in 2014. The production, which had already wrapped once, reopened so the crew could film how the community rebuilt. The Arizona YWCA also recognized Amarilla that year for her community work.

Landfill Harmonic premiered at South by Southwest in March 2015, six years after that first research trip to Paraguay. By then, the children in the orchestra had grown up performing internationally, at one point sharing a stage with members of the metal band Megadeth. The film reached theaters in September 2016. The Hollywood Reporter called it “an unlikely breakthrough story whose happy endings come with asterisks.” It also picked up honors at Sheffield Doc/Fest and the Telluride Mountainfilm Festival, and HBO, Vimeo, and Al Jazeera all eventually licensed it. NPR ran its own piece the same month the film opened in theaters.

Age and Net Worth

Search her name and dozens of pages will list a net worth, usually somewhere between three hundred thousand and a million and a half dollars, depending which page loads. None of them cite a source, and none of them agree with each other. The same is true of her birth year, which appears in several places but has never been confirmed by Amarilla, by a court filing, or by any film festival record tied to her work. The one figure that is actually documented is the divorce settlement, reported at the time to be close to five million dollars.

Where She Is Now

Amarilla has kept a low public profile since Landfill Harmonic left theaters. Her LinkedIn page lists her as based in Los Angeles, describing herself simply as a mother, activist, philanthropist, and filmmaker.

The orchestra she and Peñaranda Loftus found in a Paraguayan landfill in 2009 is still going. In October 2025, it performed at a community event in Marin County, California, nearly a decade after the film that introduced most audiences to it. Favio Chavez was still leading it, the same role he held when Amarilla and Peñaranda Loftus first met him.

Frequently Asked Questions