Film festival explores Latino culture, politics

The IU Cinema is coordinating the largest series in its existence this weekend to celebrate, explore and study contemporary Latino culture.

The Latino Film Festival and Conference is packing eight films and nearly a dozen guest filmmakers and scholars into three days, kicking off tonight with a screening of the 2008 sci-fi “Sleep Dealer.”

“What we want to do is showcase the vibrancy of Latino cinema today,” said John Nieto-Phillips,associate professor in the history department and the director of the Latino Studies Program. “We’d like to offer a window into the complex lives of Latinos within the context of the United States but also within a transnational context.”

The films are all being shown in accordance with three panels centered on social, political and cultural topics relevant to Latinos and Latin Americans. Issues such as immigration, gender identities and Cuban cinema will be debated and discussed in free conferences following the films.

“So often, issues that pertain to Latinos are hotly politicized, but they often lose sight of the wide-ranging experiences that Latino communities realize,” Nieto-Phillips said. “Those films put a human face on the issue of immigration, legality, discrimination and exploitation.”

The selection of these films was also designed to target misconceptions toward Latinos. Anke Birkenmaier, assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and a co-organizer of the festival, said how diverse Latino culture can be in relation to racial, socioeconomic and gender backgrounds.   

“It’s important to know that Latinos have been living in the U.S. now for decades,” Birkenmaier said. “These are hot topics everywhere, but the Latino community has started to speak out.”

Birkenmaier is also a specialist in Cuban studies and will be leading the panel discussion about Cuban cinema.

“Oftentimes there is the idea that Cuba is a dictatorship and not much interesting production comes out of Cuba,” Birkenmaier said. “I think these films show that some of the questions that are important in Cuba are just as important in the United States.”

But Nieto-Phillips stressed the importance of accessibility in promoting a sense of cultural understanding, encouraging anyone on campus or in the broader Bloomington community to attend this entirely free and open film festival.

“This would provide people who may not have a chance to understand the complexity of Latinos lives on an everyday basis and will help to provide insight,” Nieto-Phillips said. “It will also help to dispel the impressions that all Latinos are immigrants or that all immigrants are Latino. There’s a whole range of diverse human conditions.”

Birkenmaier said the pair of Cuban films “Memories of Underdevelopment” and “Memories of Overdevelopment,” amongst others this weekend, will be universally relatable.

“That feeling a Latino might have upon living in the U.S., that feeling of alienation in speaking a different language and coming from a culture that no one knows about — that is a feeling people in a lot of different situations will be able to understand,” Birkenmaier said.