just words
vol one : no one
04.01
present future past
10/01/99
From Gregorio Cortez to Greg Nava
San Diego Latino Film Festival tears down border between commercial and independent Latino filmmakers
by Victor Payan
It's 7pm on a Saturday and the line of brown bodies snakes through the lobby and down the gilded grand staircase of the United Artists Horton Plaza theaters in downtown San Diego. At the foot of the stairs, scurrying volunteers try to match pace with the steady stream of arriving patrons. A healthy cross-section of the America of Tomorrow is gabbing in inglespañol about everything from Salma Hayek to the latest sale at Crate and Barrel.
They are here to see El Norte, the watershed independent film by Gregory Nava which, when it was originally released in 1983, struggled to make a dent in the fledgling arthouse circuit.
Soon the six hundred moviegoers begin to file into the theater, abuzz with anticipation. Nava is being honored that night, and with him have come stars from the film and a small Hollywood entourage, which includes a couple of brown bombshells and Bel Hernandez, publisher of Latin Heat. Earlier that night, Nava was interviewed for an internet audience, and now he will speak to the crowd about the long journey from El Norte to Selena.
In many ways, this scene serves as a perfect focal point for discussing the impact of the San Diego Latino Film Festival, which has brought high-quality and even controversial contemporary Latino films to a town which once boasted Pete Wilson as its mayor.
If only some of those nattering nabobosos of the entertainment industry who claim that Latinos don't spend money at the movies had seen those long and patient lines of moviegoers, eagerly waiting to see films that, except for the festival, they would never have heard of. They would have cried.
There were no multi-million dollar ad campaigns promoting these films, no effects-heavy tv spots and no Taco Bell collector's cups to champion them. But, nonetheless, the audiences demonstrated that the Latino community, from both sides of the border, is willing to attend, to wait for, and most importantly to pay to see a good Latino film. In Spanish. With subtitles. Latino actors. Seven bucks a head. Five thousand heads. They came, they saw, they bought popcorn.
And with the rise to prominence of other major Latino film festivals in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Chicago, Miami and New York, this scene is being played out all over the country.
"It was a big success," says festival director Ethan Van Thillo. "Every night was packed. Every night was something big. We started off big, and we ended big. We nearly sold out on Friday. We sold out on Saturday. It's tough to say which was the best night."
This success was welcome news to Van Thillo and festival co-director Fred Salas, who had spent much of the previous year scouting films, talking to filmmakers, soliciting sponsors, writing press releases, working the phones and raising money for the six-day event.
Apart from Van Thillo and Salas, the festival is mobilized by a core of dedicated volunteers, which adds to the its triumph. Film festivals are such huge undertakings that putting one together without the support of a core salaried staff or publicity team is in itself an achievement, what with the coordination of screenings, visiting filmmakers, honorees, panel discussions, interviews and afterparties.
The San Diego Latino Film Festival took flight in 1998 after four years as Cine Estudiantil, the country's only Chicano/Latino/Native American student film festival. Cine Estudiantil was started in 1994, with the help of Gene Chavira at UC San Diego's Voz Fronteriza magazine and the Centro Cultural de la Raza, and was modeled after a Chicano film series Van Thillo had created at UC Santa Cruz.
Van Thillo coordinated activities from the Centro Cultural and from his house, which continues as the festival's headquarters. During these early days, the addition of a fax machine or a laser printer for his Mac were causes for celebration. (Note: the SDLFF has since left the Centro and is now working with the San Diego Media Arts Center.)
"When we first started at UC Santa Cruz, there weren't that many Latino festivals," says Van Thillo. "The whole concept seemed to be kind of new. There was that Chicano cinema book by Gary Keller and there was Chon Noriega going around, but there wasn't really that much of an interest. But (then) you saw more festivals and films. It's wonderful to be part of this whole movement. Now there's Latino film festivals all over the place."
In its first year, as Cine Estudiantil struggled to gather support from San Diego funding sources, it added a screening at the Casa de la Cultura in Tijuana, signalling a demand for this kind of work from south of the border. This would later result in a full schedule of screenings in Tijuana, Ensenada, Mexicali and even a mini-festival in Morelia.
But for that first screening at the Casa de la Cultura in 1994, there was so little time and money that when the Tijuana organizers Jarco Amezcua and Jose Luis Lepe discovered that the auditorium lacked a movie screen, they located a theater curtain in another room, painted it white and nailed it to the wall. The paint may still have been wet at the time of the screening, but it served its purpose and several hundred Tijuaneros packed the hall to see a collection of films that they would not have seen anywhere else in the world.
After the screening that night of his short film Distant Water, which deals with racial discrimination in Los Angeles in the 1940s, Carlos Avila took to the stage and addressed the crowd. About two questions into the dialogue one hostile critic snarled, "How come you Chicanos are always making films about the past? When are you going to start making films about the present, about the realities of today?" The otherwise soft-spoken Avila clenched his fists, stared down the malcreado and shot back, "This is my film that I made with my money. If you want to see a different film, spend your own money."
This was the manifesto of 1994, when the brats of the prevolution were making films with titles like Cholo Joto, Chukozilla, Mujeria, and Birth of a mis-ce-ge-Nation on pure faith, begged, borrowed or stolen, for the sheer joy of it, not seeming to care if anyone was watching. Animation, experimental, documentary, personal narrative, Hollywood caca...all of these divergent forms were represented in the 1994 roster. And people were watching, maybe even being inspired to think that hey, I can do that, and then having films of their own ready for 1995.
And the audience reaction, which included an electric sense of empowerment, was being seen not only in San Diego and Tijuana, but wherever these films were being shown to Latino audiences. Fred Salas, who is now co-director of the San Diego Latino Film Festival, witnessed this energy as director of his own Latino film festival in Mesilla, New Mexico.
"It was at the very beginning of these medium-sized Hollywood Latino films that were still afraid to say that they were a 'Latino' film, and you had all of the scholarly stuff happening," says Salas. "And then things started to emerge. I remember opening up a magazine and seeing something about Lourdes Portillo, and I thought we needed to bring this kind of work here.
"It just kind of clicked. The audience loved (the films), because they had never seen these works. And it was that beautiful clichéd reaction where people we're saying, 'hey, that's me on the screen.' And then people like Lourdes and Carlos Avila, Luis Mesa and Jimmy Mendiola and everybody were really into it, because they had wanted to make films for brown audiences, but there had not been brown audiences before."
Salas compares the enthusiastic reaction these films were receiving at his festival to reactions he saw the same films getting at mainstream "independent film" festivals.
"If they got any response at all," he says, "it was either people thinking it was very quaint or people being completely confused. Confused and angry. It's like they wouldn't give them any room for maneuvering. The other thing that was happening was that Latinos were doing really funky, experimentalesque work (which is) now getting all the praise.
"People at the big festivals like Sundance, they want a certain kind of Latino film. They want us to be on the bus, crying because we're either coming to America or leaving the barrio, always with our tear-stained faces looking out the window of the bus, yelling 'I'm going to make it for you, mom!' God bless 'em, because they try, but that's what they want. The mom's a nurse who works eight jobs. Dad's a drunk, but he's really a good man. The kids are breaking out of the barrio, but one of them's going to die. That's what they want."
Today, after the successes of Titanic, Deep Blue Sea, Danzón, Reyes y Rey and Angeles, Tijuana can be considered a "film town," complete with its own filmworkers union even. But back in 1994 it seemed like there were only two movie theaters in TJ, and one of them showed porn. The presence of Cine Estudiantil gave the south of the border community a chance to see that their realities and the realities of north of the border Latinos were similar.
It was like the meeting of long-lost brothers. It was as if they were looking into a mirror and seeing themselves for the first time, as if they were stepping through the looking glass and coming out in a world that reflected them, as if someone was finally getting the point that they laughed and cried and got pissed off just like everybody else, as if they really mattered.
As Cine Estudiantil progressed, it became more and more clear that film students from both sides of the border were putting out better and longer films, with an eye toward penetrating a larger market. Mexican film school offerings such as Novia Mia, Domingo Siete and the controversial political thriller Felix Como El Gato could stand toe-to-toe with professional Mexican films like Cabeza de Vaca, Cronos and Like Water for Chocolate. And US-made films like Pretty Vacant, Games or Holy Tortilla were every frame as fresh as American independent milestones like She's Gotta Have It or Down By Law. And there was the feeling that they could all blow the pants off of American Pie if they only had a chance.
But what made them even more precious was the presence of a vision that differed greatly from the one Hollywood paraded on the world like an army of occupation. Here was an entire spectrum of films that were not afraid to make you think, that hoisted themselves like pirate flags to present truly independent points of view. And these were independent films being made the old fashioned way, without the help of Disney, Sony or some other corporate "indie" distributor. These were films that were being scraped together with ganas, gritos and una poca de gracia.
Over the past six years of the San Diego festival, it was amazing to be offered nearly three hundred films in which, consistently, there was not a celebration of violence, not a celebration of consumerism, not a celebration of the military, not a celebration of exploitation and not a celebration of destruction.
While the sound of explosions and gunfire could occasionally be heard bleeding through from the adjacent theater at Horton Plaza this year, festivalgoers were treated to a celebration of human dignity, social justice and respect.
David Riker, whose stunning feature film La Ciudad opened the 1999 San Diego Latino Film Festival, first came into contact with Van Thillo when he was a student and submitted the film as a short in 1995. The significance of such a festival, especially at that point in his career, is not lost on Riker.
"I remember at that time that Cine Estudiantil was unique because it showed films on both sides of the border," says Riker. "It means a lot to be coming back."
La Ciudad, which was originally a short film about an itinerant puppeteer and his daughter, returned as a feature composed of four short stories dealing with life in immigrant New York. Shot in black and white and using non-actors from the communities in which it was filmed, La Ciudad shows us a New York that is not Woody Allen's New York or Spike Lee's New York. It is Mayor Giuliani's "It's Giuliani Time" New York.
Riker's tales of exploited workers and kind souls yearning to breathe free were developed through workshops with locals, and this adds a level of realism to them. The stories were filmed over four years, during which time Riker gained an appreciation for the contemporary immigrant experience. During this period, New York police broke up a forced labor ring that enslaved deaf mute immigrants from Mexico.
"When that story broke," says Riker, "none of the people I was working with were surprised, because they see that kind of thing all the time."
"I've grown," adds Riker. "I have a new understanding about what the United States is and what the Americas are, and the film we've made is an attempt to combat the ignorance, the 'ignore-ance,' the ignoring of what transformations are happening in this country...Just a few blocks from where Disney is remaking Times Square, sixty thousand garment workers go to work every day in horrible conditions."
It was this move by filmmakers toward making feature films which motivated Van Thillo to up the ante and make Cine Estudiantil a bona fide star-studded feature film festival.
"It was in '97 when we had Edward James Olmos at SDSU, and Edward James Olmos packed the house," he says. "There were seven hundred people there. It was just amazing. And it finally clicked to me that people want to see feature films, and people want to see stars. I thought we would change the image completely if we were in downtown San Diego at the major movie theater. I thought (a major chain) would want to get involved, because we were bringing people to their theaters, especially Latinos, who are a big moviegoing audience."
But the reality was much different. As competitors in the real marketplace, theater managers didn't share Van Thillo's vision about giving up one of the three screens showing My Favorite Martian for his festival. Even the local Landmark theaters, which have been the traditional home of independent cinema and alternative film festivals, were unmoved.
"I went in naively," he says. "But it was a hard lesson to learn that they don't really care about the exposure. They just want to cover the money and sell popcorn. You got to have the money to rent a first class venue, and you have to approach them speaking their language."
The increased profile and scope of the festival meant a much higher cost to put it on. Connections Van Thillo had made with the local press and Hispanic media outlets during the Cine Estudiantil days paid off, as Latino-owned radio and television stations donated spots and participated in ticket giveaways. Sponsors liked the new focus of the festival as well.
But an expanded festival would mean nothing without the product to back it up. When Van Thillo started looking for quality first-run films from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Brasil and Cuba, he found them, as each country was investing in an infrastructure to combat the Hollywood stranglehold on its movie screens. But when he started looking for US-made Latino feature films, the pickings were slim. Nevertheless, they were there. They were small and self-financed, but they were there. American Latino filmmakers were responding to a new reality that Salas had also sensed was emerging.
"Short films used to be calling cards, and they're not anymore," says Salas. "People are paying attention to features, because the big breakouts of the past few years have been people whose first film is a feature."
The increase in features has resulted in films such as Richard Salazar's Atomic Blue Mexican Wrestler, Jose Luis Valenzuela and Evelina Fernandez's Luminarias, and the aforementioned La Ciudad. Other films, such as Miguel Arteta's Star Maps have even been picked up by major distributors.
New films hoping to be seen next year include Carlos Avila's The Price of Glory, Mary Gomez's Desi's Looking for a New Girlfriend , Alfredo Ramos' Road Dogs and a remake of Salt of the Earth. In addition, the June 1999 Special Production Issue of Latin Heat listed over fifty Latino projects in development. Most of these are commercial feature ventures, television pilots or documentaries.
The move toward feature filmmaking means that filmmakers are having to aggressively learn the business of making films. From financing to negotiating deals to logistics, American Latino filmmakers are forming production companies and educating themselves to compete in the open marketplace.
"You can't get your friends together for a few weekends and a six pack of beer to make a feature film like you can with a short, even a really good short," says Salas. "It's a much more serious undertaking, and people are learning that. You need a real crew. You need real equipment. You need real money."
And the higher cost of making a film means that it needs to work harder to earn back it's investment, and attracting audiences becomes not just a question of art, but of commerce.
"You have to get to the point where you stop using that old excuse of, 'I don't care if only six people see it, because it's so beautiful, because it's a work of art,'" says Salas. "Bullshit! If you don't care if six people are going to see it, screen it at your house. Invite seven friends. Don't say you don't care. You care or you wouldn't be doing it. Tell it to your grandmother, don't tell it to me."
While many filmmakers are courting Hollywood, still others remain fiercely independent, using the old grassroots, university and festival networks as well as public television and the internet to get their films shown. But this may be shaky ground as Latino cinema becomes more mainstream. What by default used to be independent cinema, now stands on the verge of becoming (¡guacala!) commercial. So you have Gregorio Cortez on the one hand, and Greg Nava on the other.
"(People) are thinking that all Latino filmmakers are middle class, and that's not true at all," says Salas. "I think it's a bit of a scary time. But we're still trying to keep that focus with the San Diego Latino Film Festival. There has to be a place for these kinds of films, for shorts, for political and experimental and for student works."
To address this dichotomy, Van Thillo and Salas have started a monthly Cine Club screening/discussion series at the San Diego Public Library as well as a successful Cine Mexicano series in Chula Vista.
"Cine Club was started a year ago," says Van Thillo. "It's been a year. Very successful event. It shows that people want to see independent work, experimental work. They also want to have discussions. Cine Mexicano is more for the family walking around the mall. You see a real diverse audience, Latinos from all different economic backgrounds. I think the whole argument that Latinos don't come to the movie theaters is really being shattered just with this Cine Mexicano. We're up to almost 800 or 900 people (per film) without any real advertising.
"These audiences who are coming, these are not professors from universities. These are just your normal everyday Latinos living in San Diego and Chula Vista and up to Oceanside who are just into Spanish-language film."
For the next San Diego Latino Film Festival, which takes place from March 7-12, 2000, Van Thillo and Salas are striving to provide a festival which will be a valuable resource not only for the filmmaker but for the audience through dialogues, panel discussions, special screenings for high school students, parties and networking opportunities.
The emergence of an A-list of clout-wielding directors, writers and actors, or what Ric Salinas of Culture Clash refers to as "the Wet Pack," may not be far off, with heavyweights such as Gregory Nava and Moctezuma Esparza renewing their commitment to develop Chicano projects. But until then, film festivals such as the San Diego Latino Film Festival remain key partisans in the struggle for Latino filmic expression, critical compañeros in the fight to tear down the celluloid border.
© 1999 Victor Payan