Published By LOOKOUT SANTA CRUZ
Under the theme Stories Matter, the 9th annual Watsonville Film Festival(WFF) will present online a powerful and unique selection of 20 films by award-winning directors and local filmmakers for free from March 5-13.
We are very proud to be able to share this program with the community. After canceling our Festival two days before Opening Night in 2020 due to the pandemic, we kept working all year to put this program together. The situation with COVID has been very intense for everyone, especially for Watsonville, so we decided to offer our programming free as a gift to our community.
Starting Friday, March 5th at 7 p.m., you can watch, via our virtual cinema, films that celebrate Latinx artistry, that put a human face on issues we are confronting as a society, and that give us reasons to rejoice and have hope.
It’s important to note that historically, Latinx have been underrepresented in front of and behind the camera. Only 4.5% of movies released in the last 10 years featured Latinx characters, many of them with negative stereotypes. Watsonville Film Festival is doing its part to bring equity and representation to cinema in our region.
— Consuelo Alba, Executive Director of the Watsonville Film Festival
By putting the spotlight on filmmakers who tell new or long-overlooked stories, and by inviting underrepresented voices to share their creativity, Watsonville Film Festival is weaving a new and vibrant tapestry of what the world really looks like.
Empowering our community, especially our youth, to tell their own stories and sharing those narratives is something we are truly proud of. This year we are presenting four local shorts created during the pandemic by high school and college students. All films will be available at watsonvillefilmfest.orgfrom March 5-13 for free. Donations are greatly appreciated. Films not in English have English subtitles.