Giving a face, a name and a story to people previously dehumanized brings their humanity back. That is one of the pillars of the four-day Watsonville Film Festival.
The festival marks the reopening of downtown Watsonville’s Fox Theater, a 1920s-era Spanish Colonial style theater, after seven years dark.
Consuelo Alba co-founded the festival five years ago with her husband John and Jacob Martinez. “It’s been our dream to present our films [at The Fox],” she says. “It’s beautiful, with lots of original features like mural paintings from the ’40s.”
The opening night, 6pm Thursday, will flow from a ribbon cutting to a red carpet to a reception honoring four filmmakers who made a series of films in the 1980s focused on different ethnic groups on the Monterey Bay. One of those films is 1985’s Dollar A Day, 10 Cents a Dance.
It captures Filipino men telling their stories of life and hard labor in California’s ag fields way back in the 1920s and ’30s. The sound is cottony, the picture grainy, the narration and titles more functional than fancy, but it’s an important chronicle in the timeline of immigration in California.
That’s followed by a five short films by younger generations of local filmmakers who follow suit, including Brenda Avila-Hanna’s 9-minute Libertad, about Alejandra Santiago, an indigenous trans-woman from Oaxaca now living in Santa Cruz. Landfill Harmonic (7pm Fri) is a feature about the Recycled Orchestra of Cateura, in which kids whose families live and work near the biggest dump in Paraguay make instruments from discarded trash and play beautiful music. Ovarian Psychos (7pm Sat) is about a group of young women of color in East L.A. who are reclaiming social and political territory by riding their bikes in the streets as a collective against injustice.
Seoyeon Kim, an animation professor at CSU Monterey Bay, is receiving the festival’s Inspirational Filmmaker Award to open Saturday’s afternoon short film program, which also includes work by CSUMB students. Almost all the films are followed by talks with filmmakers and partners. “We’re integrating them to engage people,” Alba says.
After the closing film, the Academy Award-nominated Boy & World (4pm Sun), a Brazilian percussion band will lead a procession out of the theater, down the street, to the Plaza Vigil for food, drinks and live music by Los Malangueros. And that’s a wrap.
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