At this year’s third annual Chica Luna Short Film Festival, top prize went to Elvira Carrizal’s “Mariposa,” a film about a high school photographer who, motivated by reports of women murdered in Juarez, crosses the border into Mexico and is kidnapped.
I have attended all three Chica Luna festivals and they gave me an idea about how maybe American media might evolve. As a young woman of color from Washington Heights in New York, I have grown to appreciate a different type of media, one that is true to my reality and the realities of the people in my life, a media that gives credit to our diverse attitudes and nature, acknowledging that we are not one-dimensional figures.
I can’t remember the details of all the festival films I’ve seen, but I do remember my experience of the festival more generally. I was made extremely uncomfortable by but was also moved by what I was watching. How intriguing, I thought to myself, “Women of color finally making films and where are the happy endings? Characters find themselves trapped in abusive relationships, are raped or beaten because of their sexual orientation. Could it be possible that ‘minority people’ can not even be ‘perfect’ in their own films?â€
Still, I wasn’t discouraged; I was satisfied, because I had never seen anything like it. The violence was not celebrated, not used to amuse the audience. It was a way to raise awareness about some of the things that really happen in our communities. It dawned upon me that the point of the films in the festival was not simply to entertain. With popular media, I had grown used to fairytale endings. Now I can appreciate the brutal truth. I want to hear it and see it and even do something about it.
In its third year, the festival packed the house. Perhaps people are getting the message, maybe they have developed a taste for media that offers food for thought.
The films shown at the Chica Luna Festival are produced by independent women filmmakers and obtained through a national call for work submissions. Most of the films, however, are created by members of Chica Luna’s very own F-word program, which is a multimedia justice project for women between sixteen and twenty-five. The program was launched in January 2005 to help cultivate the talents of young women filmmakers of various racial, sexual, economic and linguistic identities, throughout the five boroughs in New York, helping them become advocates for a new media future. For an entire year they participate in weekly workshops on media literacy, filmmaking, advocacy, self-reflection and healing. Members of the F-word program are mentored and trained by industry professionals as screenwriters, directors, producers, cinematographers, and editors. In 2006 eight young women were accepted into the selective program.
Filmmaker Sala Hewitt of the F-word program says that Chica Luna allowed her to test the waters with her first short, “Good Looking Out,” a film about homophobia in African-American neighborhoods. She said it was especially rewarding for her to see the audience react sympathetically to the queer issues explored in the film, which were inspired by real-life incidents of harassment and policing in her Brooklyn community. She applied for the Chica Luna Film Festival in order to overcome her anxiety about showing her work.
“My passion is to develop and share in story-making that fills the gaps of representation for women and queer folks of color…the festival demonstrated that queer issues need not be, and I feel should not be segregated from wider cultural forums,” she said.
Chica Luna Productions is a non-profit founded in September 2001 to support women of color seeking to produce popular media that explores themes of social justice. In October 2005 the company opened a community-based office in El Barrio, New York, and now includes members in both New York and Los Angeles. Chica Luna exists to give women of color a broader identity by shattering the stereotypes of “welfare queens†and “sexual deviants,†images that are internalized and become models for behavior.
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Jazmin De La Cruz is a Chica Luna Production Intern. Filmmaker images courtesy Chica Luna Productions. Thumbnail film-still from “Mariposa.”
