Week Seis - Last Saturday of the festival!
The last Saturday of our 2024 festival edition will be at iMpErFect Gallery, with a selection of films that are specially curated for this special weekend. You also have until the end of the week to enjoy our virtual programming.
Make your way to Germantown once more to help us ring in the last weekend!
LOS FEATURES
A Thousand Pines
A Thousand Pines shows the lives of migrants who depend on the controversial guest worker visa program, following a crew of workers from Oaxaca, Mexico over the course of a season planting trees throughout the United States. The crew struggles to balance the job’s physical demands and its extreme isolation while remaining connected to their families back home. As the season progresses, they become a small family, cooking and caring for each other in order to endure the punishing work. The film centers on the crew foreman, Raymundo Morales, who is in his 19th season working for the largest reforestation company in the US. When he began, he was single and had few responsibilities. Now, however, he must balance his obligations to his wife, his children, and his elderly mother with a heart condition, while also tending to the needs and emergencies of the planting crew. Spending only three months at home during the off-season, Raymundo’s job is both the family’s salvation and its heartbreak.
A Symphony For A Common Man / Sinfonia De Um Homem Comum
Brazilian ambassador José Bustani, the first director of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, tried to avoid the destruction of Iraq, but was forced out under pressure from the USA. Today, similar situations are repeating themselves in the multilateral organizations.
Ninety Minutes Later
My documentary is about Vanessa Marquez, who was killed in her own home in 2018 by police officers after a 90-minute long "wellness check." The officers entered her apartment after a close friend contacted the local fire station to check on her. Police came instead of the paramedics, and found Marquez having a seizure, living in hoarding conditions. They quickly decided she needed to be "5150'd" (forcibly taken for mental evaluation) and somehow delayed the execution of this plan for nearly an hour and a half. When the officer finally instructed her to go with them, Marquez (still in bed) reached for something under her blankets that looked like a gun, and the police fled, assuming shooting positions at the bottom of her apartment stairwell. They start to call her out of her unit, and minutes later she emerged on the stairs with the gun and an armful of stuffed animals. Officers open-fired at her. The gun turned out to be plastic. The woman turned out to be a well known actress, whose body of work included an iconic 1980s movie, Stand and Deliver (Edward James Olmos, Lou Diamond Phillips) as well as 27 episodes of the hit TV show, ER.
In this film, Vanessa's effervescent and complex personality, as well as her talent and body of work are revealed in film clips, and through the remembrances of some of her co-stars, primarily from Stand and Deliver (her breakout role). The film explores her legacy as a role model for other actors of color, as well as her tragic death which is revealed at the end of the film in never before seen body-worn camera footage. Finally, all of the participants consider what steps must be taken to make lasting change in our response to mental health calls, and ask all to consider being role models and agents of change in their communities and their own lives.
Behind Closed Doors / A Portas Fechadas / A Puertas Cerradas
In 1968, Brazil’s military government passed a law that ushered in the most violent period of the dictatorship. The meeting was recorded, but remained secret for decades. The documentary combines these audio tracks with propaganda films of the time.
El Huatrila
Raúl studies in one of the most expensive private English schools in Lima, thanks to his father, Máximo, who is a teacher there and the school photographer. However, Raúl has never felt that he fits in. He counts the days for the year to end and waits to see if he will win a scholarship to a university abroad in Madrid.
A sudden change forces Raúl to rethink his life and dreams. This situation takes him on a journey to reconnect with his father’s community that he left as a child and to uncover the power of his roots.
LOS ESPECIALES
Amor en Cuarentena Series
Set in the Central Coast, the Spanglish series follows Emi, a funny, dedicated and complicated Mexican-American teacher and hopeless romantic, as she looks for love with the help of friends and family during a global pandemic.
