POV and Cinema Tropical have launched ‘Bridging Worlds: Exploring Latin American and Latinx Stories Across Borders and Cultures,’ a thought-provoking and inspiring online curated series of four programs featuring films from POV’s impressive catalog of U.S. Latinx and Latin American cinema. The series will be available for free during the month of April, 2023.
Each of the programs pairs a feature with a short film to explore numerous topics and issues in provocative and engaging ways. From aging to gender expression, immigration, and childhood, the pairing of these local and international stories also aims to create an insightful conversation about different communities in the U.S. and in Latin America.
For over 35 years, POV has had a longstanding commitment to Latinx and Latin American stories and filmmakers, having hosted the broadcast premieres of landmark films including Señorita Extraviada by Lourdes Portillo, Patricio Guzmán’s 2010 gorgeous masterpiece Nostalgia for the Light, the 2018 magical realist documentary 306 Hollywood, and the Chilean Oscar-nominated film The Mole Agent by Maite Alberdi in 2021, among many other titles.
The series “Bridging Worlds: Exploring Latin American and Latinx Stories Across Borders and Cultures” celebrates POV’s dedication to the U.S. Latinx and Latin American cinema, while expanding the traditional narratives that are commonly tied to these communities on both sides of the border.
Program:
Program 1: Muxes + Things We Dare Not Do. Premieres Monday, April 3.
Muxes (Iván Olita, USA, 2016, 9 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Things We Dare Not Do (Cosas que no hacemos, Bruno Santamaría, Mexico, 2020, 71 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
These two documentaries explore issues of sexuality and gender expression in different ways and in two distinctive parts of Mexico along the Pacific coast. Muxes documents the long-standing traditions among the nonbinary Indigenous residents in the rural community of Juchitán, Oaxaca, while Things We Dare Not Do follows 16-year-old Noño, who lives in a small coast village and, defying gender norms, works up the courage to tell his family he wants to love his life as a woman, a fraught decision in a country shrouded in machismo and transphobia.
Program 2: Águilas + The Infiltrators. Premieres Monday, April 10..
Águilas (Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Maite Zubiaurre, USA, 2021, 14 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
The Infiltrators (Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera, USA, 2019, 95 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles)
The Oscar-shortlisted Águilas and Sundance Award–winning The Infiltrators shed valuable insight on America’s flawed and inhuman immigration system. The short film tells the story of a group of searchers—the Águilas del Desierto—who volunteer monthly to recover the missing migrants along the scorching southern border in Arizona. The ingenious and clever The Infiltrators chronicles the true story of two young immigrants who purposefully get arrested by Border Patrol and are put in a shadowy for-profit detention center. They are on a mission to stop deportations, and the best place to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention.
Program 3: La Lectora + La Casa de Mama Icha. Premieres Monday, April 17.
La Lectora (Yulia Piskuliyska, UAE, 2017, 10 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
La Casa de Mama Icha (Óscar Molina, Colombia/USA, 2021, 90 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
La Lectora and La Casa de Mama Icha offer two contrasting perspectives on aging in Cuba and Colombia. A decades-old cigar factory on the Caribbean island is home to the time-honored tradition of la lectora—a reader who entertains the cigar makers while they go about their delicate toil. La Casa de Mama Icha follows a Colombian elder migrant who, after years of living in the U.S., decides to return to her hometown of Mompox, having sent money to build her dream house there. Now, at the end of her life, Mama Icha boards a plane and flies back to Colombia where she bravely struggles with her loved ones.
Program 4: Crisanto Street + Fruits of Labor Premieres Monday, April 24.
Crisanto Street (Paloma Martínez, USA, 2017, 12 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
Fruits of Labor (Emily Cohen Ibáñez, USA, 76 min. In English and Spanish with English subtitles)
These two films portray the difficulties of growing up in a working-class Latinx immigrant communities in Northern California. Set in a hidden community in the shadow of Silicon Valley, Cristanto Street follows eight-year-old resident Geovany Cesario, who uses his camera to document the day when the time comes to move. Fruits of Labor tells the story of Ashley, a Mexican-American teenager who dreams of graduating high school and going to college. But when ICE raids threaten her family, she is forced to become the breadwinner, working days in the strawberry fields and nights at a food processing factory.
For more information, and to access the films, visit: www.pbs.org/pov/filmslist/bridging-worlds-cinema-tropical
