Not just because my favorite color is red is the 90’s incarnation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula my favorite version of the book on film, and not just because I was very much into Winona Ryder at that time, either. I totally dug Eiko Ishioka - the stunningly talented production artist/illustrator/costume design/concept artist who worked on the film and came up with these fantastic illustrations for the costumes, which turned out like elfwork.

The opening session this morning at the 9th Annual NALIP (National Association of Latino Independent Producers) conference in Dana Point, California this morning was a discussion of the possibility of Pan-Latino cinema. The panelists were great, with Yareli Arismendi (a writer, LA Times, FAST FOOD NATION), Frida Torresblanco (Producer of Pan’s Labyrinth), Mireya Navarro (LA Bureau of the NY Times), a representative from PBS, and others.

The panelists acknowledged that there was a moment when “Magical Reality” was a pan-latin aesthetic, but that was then and now is now. This morning, the conversation seemed to focus on questions of personal identity, family and sports.

There is a “high concept” Pan-Latino development that may be spawning a new aesthetic even now. Over the last few years, democratic elections in several major countries across Latin American, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and Paraguay, have brought into view a new movement to build a new relationship between people and their economies and their governments. This movement is different from the so-called “dirigiste” state regimes of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s — and strikingly different from the increasingly materialist social organization of the United States.

Democracy in Latin America represents an effort to find a “third way”, a way to balance individual liberties, community concerns and productive economies in new ways. This political/social development is truly global, with connections to developments in China and India. Developments this significant can spawn a new aesthetic in cinema.

In the same way that the rapid introduction of unfettered capitalism into Chinese society has produced gorgeous, emotional and award winning films on environmental issues (Up The Yangtze) and social family questions (Still Life) — so too can the emerging new social order in Latin America lead to films of extraordinary merit (Manda Bala, in this past year for example).

… And that surely would be a Pan-Latino Cinema with Global impact!

I know that this blog comes a little late in the film festival game, when the ink has long dried on other True/False reactions and filmmakers/watchers/aficionados are firmly ensconced in the thick Austin heat. But, I plead the classic teacher defense of simply not having had a minute since I got back to school. One reason is that, invigorated by the films I saw at the True/False documentary festival, I have been pumping my doc students fill of energy and enthusiasm as they prepare to begin their own film projects.

When, after a glorious whirlwind of a festival, I found myself sleep-deprived, delirious, and frenzied, standing in front of 20 of my high school students attempting to string together a sentence, I realized the trickiness of sharing what happens at a film festival. Or, at least, what happens at the True/False film festival. Expressing the sense of creativity, community, and possibility that filled Columbia, Missouri from February 28 to March 2 to those who weren’t there seemed a daunting task. But, after a few students asked me about the films I had seen, I snapped out of internally basking in the joy of applause-filled Midwest cinemas and awoke again in the raucous classrooms of Brooklyn. And saw how easy it is to connect the two.

For example, I found a lot of relevance to my teaching world in the documentary Very Young Girls, co-directed and produced by David Schisgall, Nina Alvarez, and Priya Swaminathan and also produced by Rachel Lloyd. The film focuses on the underage sexual exploitation industry in New York City. The terrifying truth is that the average age that girls begin to work as prostitutes in the United States is 13. The film examines the process by which young girls are indoctrinated into this way of life, and the powerful hold that their pimps have over them. The story often begins with that most innocent of emotions: first love. The girls are swept off their feet and into locked-up apartments by their obsession with the men, usually in their 30s, who end up selling them for sex. And yet, the girls overwhelmingly defend their pimps, and attempt to return to them once they have been rescued or have escaped. Once there, the notion of unconditional love supersedes any violence or abuse that they suffer at the hands of these men; at least it is a constant in a life of much uncertainty, something that can be predicted and will not change or go away. Thus, one of the most challenging tasks of Rachel Lloyd and her employees at GEMS, Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a survivor-led organization that helps underage sex workers, is deprogramming the victims.

As disturbing and widespread as this phenomenon is in Brooklyn, there are scenes in Bushwick and a mention of Bedford-Stuyvesant in the film, which is where I teach, I haven’t seen it. The fact that it was a documentary that alerted me to a problem that is prevalent in the community in which I have spent every school day for the last five years showed me how hidden and thus how insidious the industry is. Now, looking back, I think that I have lost at least one student to the industry, a student who needed to make money to support her baby, and I am sure that my students and the people they know are affected by this issue more than I would have guessed. It reinforced two of the lessons that I teach when I teach documentary film: that, despite the increasing number of documentaries being made, there are still countless stories to be told and voices to be heard and, cheesiest and most bleeding-heart of all, documentary still has the power to change people’s lives.

Case in point: I met Rachel Lloyd the night that I watched Very Young Girls; now that I know about the work that GEMS does, I can work with her to recruit her girls to my alternative school, which is specifically designed for 17 to 21 year olds who have been out of school at some point but who want to earn a high school diploma.

The documentary that entertained me the most is American Teen, directed by Nanette Burstein. I expected the struggles of the four white, middle-class Warsaw, Indiana high school students to contrast with those of my poor black and Hispanic city students, yet much of what was captured on camera was surprisingly familiar to me. The alternative high school in which I teach, Brooklyn Academy, is a second, third, or fourth high school for the students there, and the factors that brought them to the school mirror the experiences of American Teen’s four subjects: Hannah, Colin, Megan, and Jake. I see artistic rebel Hannah in all of my students who left their other high schools because their styles, tastes, interests, and sexualities made them targets of abuse; I see talented athlete Colin in many of my students for whom basketball is the only way into college; I see popular achiever Megan (whose overbearing father told her, in the same breath, “You don’t have to go to Notre Dame” and “ Just because I had a really good time there. And your brother and sister had a really good time there.”) in all of my students who continue to have to deal with pressure from parents and friends. Albeit, it is a different kind of pressure, often it is a pressure to not go to school, but it has the same intensity and it does the same psychological damage. Finally, in Jake, the insecure loner, I see all of my students who felt they had to feel the humiliation and pain of not fitting in at school and who were then brave enough to return.

These films resonated with me, and as I pass that on to my students, I feel assured of one thing. After two more semesters of making short documentary films (in the past, subjects have included NY alternative schools and the “N Word” I will again be basking in the warmth of the True/False Festival. Next year, though, I plan to bring my students with me.

Though it took team Indiepix, collectively, about three days to get here, all of the networking, idea-exchanging, film and panel going, and promotion of the Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Film has been worth it. While True/False proved to be a Quaker summer camp like commune of nonfiction film celebration, South by Southwest is more like a meeting of the minds of the future. Since my good friend/blogger Joel Heller has an interactive pass, I have been privy to events like the “Facebook on Film” discussion, the Google and Frog Media receptions, and other tech-heavy content. Which is not to say I have been ignoring film. Though I have yet to get into a screening at the revamped Alamo Drafthouse (drats!), I have managed to see a few winners, including the documentary CRAWFORD an amusing but in no way timid look at the small Texas town in which George Bush chose to make his home. And ooops, just got interrupted by the wonderful Slava Rubin, from IndieGoGo. They are an independent film networking site doing some really innovative and important things with companies like B-Side and self-distribution gurus Lance Weiler and the Four-Eyed Monsters. But now, off to a screener of MATADOR, which my friend Donal edited and Steven Beer is repping. I am very exciting for this film!

More soon.

“To you the bold and foolish lambs. To you who are intoxicated with riddles, let’s go. Who take pleasure in twilight. Whose souls are lured by noise to every treacherous abyss. For you do not feel for a rope like cowards, and where you can guess you hate to calculate. And where others would poison, you dismember.”

“He wrote me: I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?” - Chris Marker