Latin American Film Festival brings power to Latinx voices

Film has been used for decades to make personal stories accessible to a wide audience. The Latin American Film Festival, to be held from Sept. 28—Nov. 8, 2017, will create a platform for the stories of the Latin American community to be shared on a wider scale.

Miguel Rojas-Sotelo, director of the festival, said it has been celebrating the power of Latin American film production since 1986. 

“Our mission is to provide a space for Latin American images, sounds and stories to be shared to our constituency,” Rojas-Sotelo said.

All of the Latin American Film Festival’s events, screenings, visits and interactions with filmmakers are completely open and free.

“This is not like any other festival,” he said. “We go to elementary schools and bring a number of very important animations produced in Latin America. We do workshops with the schools and visits to classrooms.” 

Several of the films screened at the festival are then put into libraries and visual archives at both UNC and Duke University. This allows films that are not easy to see to be made available for classroom and even community screenings. 

“Film is not just a piece of entertainment but a window to other lives,” Rojas-Sotelo said. “It is a way to share, by audiovisual means, the lives of others, not only to be amazed by their journeys and stories, but to be informed about what life is like in other territories.”

Omar Foglio and José Luis Figueroa are participating in the Latin American Film Festival with a documentary called “Tata Padrinos/Godparents,” which was made with the help of McColl Center for Art + Innovation.

“It is exciting for us because it is the premiere of this film we just finished,” Foglio said. “Since this film was partly shot in North Carolina, it is exciting for us to show it there.” 

Foglio said this documentary is important to the festival because it speaks on an indigenous community. 

“Many people mistake migrants from Mexico as being all Latino, but really, they are not, it’s so diverse, and in indigenous communities, their cultures are totally different,” Foglio said. 

The documentary focuses on positive aspects that migrant communities bring to the U.S., and the big effort and investment they make to maintain their culture, Foglio said. 

Talia Weltman-Cisneros will also be at the festival to help introduce the film "Artemio," showing Saturday, Oct. 7 at the Richard White Auditorium on Duke’s East Campus.

“The film gives a great background and narration to the experience of a child coming to Mexico, the country where his family [is] from, from the United States, but not feeling like he belongs either place,” Weltman-Cisneros said. 

Weltman-Cisneros said the festival’s theme is pathways or “caminos,” and the film "Artemio" details the path of a child’s heritage and family. 

“It provides a great space for people to share that experience, even though they might not have ever had that type of path in their life,” Weltman-Cisneros said. 

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