A film festival celebrates a diversity of Latino stories that transcend ethnicity. [Cancelled due to COVID-19]

By Walter Ryce, Monterey County Weekly, March 12, 2020

The Watsonville Film Festival covers such a wide spectrum of the Latino experience that it takes a more universal shape. This year’s films cover the fusion of Africa and the Caribbean through a hot new music rising up in Cuba (Bakoso: Afrobeats of Cuba); farmers trying to save green space in Santa Cruz’s Beach Flats neighborhood (No Place to Grow); and, prescient, a short film (The Lost) about a devastating viral outbreak.

The festival begins on Thursday, March 12, with a party, a reception and a screening of a restored classic documentary Chulas Fronteras (Beautiful Borders), about the Mexican-American musicians of the Texas and Mexican border, and a dance party DJed by Juan Antonio Cuellar who is digitizing the Strachwitz Frontera Collection at UCLA.

It ends with a group art show called Campesinos / Workers of the Land, opening 2-4pm Sunday, March 15, at the Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery featuring Arleene Correa Valencia, who is depicted in the festival film Represent, and

photographer Craig Sherod, whose portraits of braceros are in the music video Best of Me.

In between, the festival is filled with free film talks and screenings.

The film We Are the Radical Monarchs introduces audiences to an Oakland- based alternative to the Girl Scouts, aimed at girls of color ages 8 to 13 who can earn merit badges based on advocating for social justice issues like LGBTQ+ and disability rights and the environment.

The docu-thriller The Infiltrators, winner of two NEXT awards at Sundance, tells the true story about a group of undocumented Dreamers who get detained by Border Patrol to infiltrate a for-profit detention center in Florida.

The feature-length film El Sembrador (The Sower) may be a revelation for the slow, leisurely way it envelopes the viewer. It’s one of those meditative films, but there is a message that it builds slowly from the ground up.

It’s about Mariano Escobedo multigrade bilingual primary school in the rural community of Monte de los Olivos in Chiapas, Mexico. It’s about the school’s teacher, Bartolomé Vásquez Lopez, who recalls being scolded as a student for asking for help in his native Tsotsil language. And it’s about the kids in this community, who they are now, and what they might become if given the opportunity.

It’s about education, but it doesn’t cite any studies or have authorities pontificating. It focuses on the lush, green, hilly countryside, horses frollicking near a lake, fog drifting across the landscape. A constant sound is of birds chirping and insects buzzing. Then Lopez talks about how a family in this community feeds him and puts him up in their home, a structure made partly of sticks and palm leaves for a roof, and won’t let him leave because he taught their kids to read.

The film shows the children from Lopez’s class, talking about what subject they like most and using farming tools to hoe and till a patch of land in preparation for planting. Some are barefoot, some wear sandals, some sneakers. It shows them waking up in bare rooms, doing chores like gathering firewood or chopping weeds, then going to school.

Lopez’s teaching style is less about pedagogy than it is about relationships and nature.

The kids play outside, jump in dirt, roll on grass, climb trees. They make fires to cook tortillas. They find a baby bird and return it to its nest. They wrestle each other. They’re taught to swim in a local watering hole. Afterward, Lopez hoses them down in a scene of pure childhood joy that the filmmaker (Melissa Elizondo) slows down to revel in it.

In the classroom, they finish a real-world discussion. “Yesterday we found a drunk guy,” one child says. “What did he do?” Lopez asks.
“He pissed his pants,” says another kid.

“You will get older,” says Lopez. “Maybe some of you will drink beer. Is that good?”

They yell disapproval for drunkenness.

While grooming a young horse, Lopez says the kids teach each other: “In my school, they’re learning through freedom and happiness. The school is the starting point of the development of a town.”

The kids go mostly unnamed, but you get familiar with them. The filmmaker visits the home and hears the story of an older girl on the cusp of graduating, who tells a heartbreaking story about her family, and her hopes for continuing school.

Their families may want them to work instead, or they don’t have enough money.

Lopez had to learn two more languages to communicate with all his kids. Lopez says the word “complicated” a lot when talking about their education. He gets kids from age 6 to 11 and we can tell that he worries about their future after him. He can only prepare them as best he can, and he seems to be trying to figure it out along the way.

The pace of the film is a slow build and the camera is unobtrusive, which lets the story unfold in a quiet way that feels completely transporting, and in this media-saturated, instantly connected world, like a fresh revelation.

There is likely more at the festival.

[Event has been cancelled due to COVID-19 concerns] 8TH ANNUAL WATSONVILLE FILM FESTIVAL is Thursday-Sunday, March 12-15, at Watsonville Woman’s Club, Digital NEST, Pajaro Valley Arts Gallery and Beach Flats Community Center. $10/film; $25/opening night; $15/Friday films and dance party; free/youth under 21; free/film talks; no one turned away for lack of funds. watsonvillefilmfest.org