Movies
12th Cine Las Americas Opening Night
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"A Class Apart" Shows Tonight on PBS
In 1951 in the town of Edna, Texas, a field hand named Pedro Hernández murdered his employer after exchanging words at a gritty cantina. From this seemingly unremarkable small-town murder emerged a landmark civil rights case that would forever change the lives and legal standing of tens of millions of Americans. A team of unknown Mexican-American lawyers took the case, Hernández v. Texas, all the way to the Supreme Court, where they successfully challenged Jim Crow-style discrimination against Mexican Americans.
Add a commentSin Nombre
"Sin Nombre" is an epic dramatic thriller written and directed by Student Academy Award winner Cary Joji Fukunaga in his feature debut. The filmmaker’s firsthand experiences with Central American immigrants seeking the promise of the U.S. form the basis of the Spanish-language movie.
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Septiembres/Septembers
I attended the opening night festivities of Cine Las Americas film festival. Septiembres was the opening film and while it promised to be a documentary about a music contest in prison, it turned out to be a lot more. Most of the audience appeared to expect something more like American Idol with a lot more ins and outs of the competition. The film itself is sandwiched between two Septembers, the time of year the competition takes place.
Carles Bosch, the director, said the film actually started like an American Idol favor for the participating inmates - taking the prison competition and making it look as big as possible for the participants to be able to send their families a DVD. After that, though, the film was born and grew into an intimate portrayal of various kinds of confined love within the co-ed prison and outside the walls. The only kind of love missing was the brutal expectations Americans of come to expect from prison life.
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