From left to right: Iliana Sosa, Rebeca Huntt, Isabel Castro,and Jasmín Mara López
By Carlos A. Gutiérrez
In a very fortunate conjunction worthy of celebration, four U.S.-born Latina filmmakers have premiered powerful debut documentary features in the past year, a body of work that is revitalizing American independent cinema through transgenerational personal stories that challenge traditional and longstanding hegemonic narratives of identity, race, class, and migration.
Directors Isabel Castro, Rebeca Huntt, Jasmín Mara López and Iliana Sosa are not only heralding an exciting new era for U.S. Latinx cinema, but also transforming American independent cinema by pushing the definitions of what it means to be an American in 2022.
Afro-Latina director Rebeca Huntt premiered her debut feature Beba last September at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it immediately grabbed attention for Huntt’s raw and visceral self-portrait as the daughter of an Afro-Dominican father of rural origins and a Venezuelan mother of a privileged background, growing up in New York City.
In her powerful autobiographical documentary shot on 16mm and told in four chapters, Huntt combines family photos, interviews with family members, archival materials, and recently shot footage to create a personal essay commenting on the historical and societal trauma that she’s inherited, as well as on her vulnerability in facing numerous issues.
Particularly noteworthy is Huntt’s nuanced and insightful discussion of class and its intersection with race issues, something that is not very often successfully portrayed in American cinema—though another film that effectively does so is the 2013 documentary American Promise by Afro-Latina director Michèle Stephenson and Joe Brewster. Being overly conscious of the limitations of her upbringing sets up clashes for Huntt as a student in the mostly white, privileged setting of Bard College, which leads to a sharp comment from the filmmaker on this country’s blind spots in confronting class issues.
Beba went on to have a successful international film festival run, including stops at the Berlinale, Tribeca, Miami, and CPH:DOX, and was theatrically released stateside this summer by powerhouse distribution company Neon. The film recently was released online and is currently streaming on numerous platforms.
In January, Emmy-nominated director Isabel Castro premiered her documentary Mija at the Sundance Film Festival. The only filmmaker among the four on this list who does not recount her own family story, Castro examines the lives of Doris and Jacks, two Mexican-American young women—one from California, the other from Texas—who deal with numerous challenges as first-generation daughters in undocumented families.
Doris is a 26-year-old music manager who is helping her parents apply for legal status, while also acting as a bridge between them and her brother, who is living in Tijuana after being deported some years ago. On top of everything, she loses her job during the pandemic and needs to get her career back. She decides to invest in the artistic efforts of Jacks, an aspiring singer from Dallas, and the pair bond over the similar issues they face from their respective families.
Mija, meaning “my daughter,” largely focuses on the pressure that undocumented parents put on their children born on the U.S., not only in terms of job and financial expectations, but also in terms of family ties and dependency. With a powerful soundtrack, the documentary becomes a very affecting story of the struggles and hopes of first-generation Americans. Following its acclaimed debut at Sundance, Mija was bought by Disney Original Documentary and is currently playing in select theaters before its streaming release on Disney+ this September.
In What We Leave Behind, director Iliana Sosa crafts a cinematic and poetic love letter to her grandfather Julián, who at 89 takes one last ride from Mexico to El Paso, Texas, to visit his family. After decades of making this lengthy trip to visit his daughters and their children in the U.S. every month, he has decided to quietly start building a house in rural Mexico as a legacy for them.
Filmed over several years, director Sosa documents the building of her grandfather’s house, while he brings unspoken memories and reveals the pragmatism of his cross-border life. A tale of reverse migration, What We Leave Behind is an understated yet powerful meditation on the cultural and economic interconnectedness between the U.S. and Mexico through the experience of one family, which, like countless others, has binational ties in a globalized world with deep class differences.
What We Leave Behind premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in April, where it won the Fandor New Voices Award and the Louis Black Lone Star Award. Ava DuVernay’s distribution company Array Releasing recently announced its acquisition of the rights to the documentary, which is set to have a limited theatrical release accompanied by a streaming release on Netflix this September.
Director Jasmín Mara López ventures into more obscure terrain with her documentary Silent Beauty, creating a lyrical and powerful autobiographical documentary as a victim of child sexual abuse and someone who defies a culture of silence.
Elegantly mixing homemade movies and moments with members of her family, López documents an intense emotional journey that deals with her own grief and confronts her abusive grandfather, an act that results in a polarized response, with some family offering support and solidarity while others show disdain and dismissiveness.
Silent Beauty had its world premiere at the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival in Toronto in April, and few days ago saw its U.S. premiere at the Black Star Film Festival in Philadelphia.
Of course, the work of these wonderful four filmmakers does not come out from nowhere. They pull from a large cinematic tradition of U.S. Latinx filmmakers including Lourdes Portillo, Natalia Almada, Cristina Ibarra, Alex Rivera, Rodrigo Reyes, Cecilia Aldarondo, and the abovementioned Stephenson, among others.
A key reference is Portillo’s seminal 1994 film The Devil Never Sleeps (El diablo nunca duerme), in which the Mexican-American director mixes nonfiction cinema, thriller and melodrama topes to become a detective with the mission of solving the mystery of a family murder that happened in her homeland. In the process, she uncovers intrigues, hypocrisy, deceit, and disinformation.
Director Almada dealt with privilege as well as the intersection of family memory and historical legacy in her 2009 Sundance award-winning documentary El General, and Ibarra brought insight to the complexities of American identity in her breakthrough documentary Las Marthas, about a binational group of debutantes participating in an annual ball celebrating Martha Washington in the border town of Laredo, Texas.
Even though Castro, Huntt, López and Sosa have each received individual acclaim for their work, they haven’t yet been recognized as members of a new generation of American filmmakers that is challenging outdated notions and tropes of a country that is painfully grasping with what kind of nation it is and wants to be in the future.
Carlos A. Gutiérrez is the Executive Director of Cinema Tropical.
