FIRST SEASON TO PREMIERE ON PBS.ORG AND MORE IN FEBRUARY-MARCH 2024
Series Features Four Short Films by Latino Filmmakers
Los Angeles, CA/January 25, 2024 – Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB) today announced that its signature series VOCES will premiere a new digital series, VOCES SHORTS, in February-March 2024. Curated by LPB and showcasing the work of both emerging and established filmmakers, this anthology of narrative and nonfiction work explores issues such as identity, economy, arts, and community. VOCES SHORTS will be available via streaming on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS App, available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZI as well as LPB’s social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), and electronic newsletter Latino VOCES.
“These four new shorts offer an eye-opening look into worlds that are rarely explored,” says LPB Executive Director and VOCES Executive Producer Sandie Viquez Pedlow. “From a drama about meatpackers at the front lines of the COVID pandemic to a growing community of Latinos in Alaska, from a dreamlike exploration of identity to an autobiographical look at life in a Texas oil town, this series offers four up-to-the-minute snapshots of the diversity and complexity of Latino life in America today.”
In addition, later this year the VOCES series will continue with the premieres of five new full-length documentaries on both broadcast and streaming, on PBS and PBS.org.
The schedule for VOCES SHORTS follows below:
Monday, February 12, 2024
THE KILL FLOOR (Writer/Producer/Director: Carlos Avila)
When the COVID-19 pandemic engulfs a meatpacking plant in his rural hometown, a young Latinx reporter returns to uncover the urgent and deadly circumstances threatening the plant’s workers — including his own father. This dramatic short has won several awards, including Best Drama at the LA Shorts International Festival and Best Narrative Short Film Audience Award at the San Diego Latino Film Festival.
Monday, February 19, 2024
SENTIR EL SON (Director/Co-Producer: Karla B. Duarte; Co-Producer: Esjae Davis)
This film tells the story of an Afro-Mexican woman’s journey to discover her racial identity through music and dance. A powerful story of self-discovery, the film follows Franchesca, who grew up in L.A. and was immersed in a Mexican culture that forced her to question her racial identity. This poetic film explores ethnicity and gender through West African and Afro-Mexican practices in music, song, and dance.
Monday, February 26, 2024
WHEN IT’S GOOD, IT’S GOOD (Producer/Director: Alejandra Vasquez)
In this autobiographical short, filmmaker Alejandra Vasquez returns to her hometown of Denver City in West Texas to document how the boom or bust nature of the town’s main industry – oil – fuels the life of the town. An intimate portrait of family, memory, and economy.
Monday, March 4, 2024
SABOR ARTICO: LATINOS EN ALASKA (Director/Producer: Indra Arriaga Delgado)
Through various perspectives on the role of food and family ritual in shaping culture – from farmers, activists, chefs, artists, educators, and more – this short explores the evolving identity of the growing Latino community in Alaska.
About the Filmmakers
THE KILL FLOOR
Carlos Avila (Writer/Producer/Director) is an award-winning director for film and television based in Los Angeles. He has directed for companies such as NBC/Universal, Warner Brothers Television, Sony Pictures Television, CBS, Jerry Bruckheimer Television, Shoreline Entertainment, New Line Cinema and PBS. His credits include the television series Grimm and Cold Case; the feature film Price of Glory (which was developed at the Sundance Institute’s Writers and Directors Lab); and several independently produced projects, including Distant Water, the magical realist series Foto-Novelas, and Tales of Masked Men. Avila and producing partner David Valdes (Avatar: The Way of Water, Dune 2 and Unforgiven) are developing the feature film Last Band Standing, which Avila wrote and will direct.
SENTIR EL SON
Karla Duarte (Director/Co-Producer) is a San Diego-based filmmaker, creative content producer, and Expressive Arts Therapist with roots on the US/Mexican border of Tijuana. She has received both national and local filmmaking grants from Latino Public Broadcasting’s Digital Media Public Fund, YAB State Farm®, Boys and Girls Foundation, Gould Foundation, and more. Duarte focuses her lens on social justice from a contemplative and poetic narrative.
Her directorial debut, Mujer Inmigrante, screened at the San Diego Latino Film Festival in 2010. She also directed and produced In Tune, a short documentary that screened at the 2019 San Diego Latino Film Festival. For over ten years, her work has focused on social issues affecting the female Latino community at the border. Her academic background includes a B.A. in Art History, Analysis, and Criticism, and an M.A. in Expressive Arts Therapy with an emphasis on film as therapy.
WHEN IT’S GOOD, IT’S GOOD
Alejandra Vazquez (Director/Producer) is a Mexican-American director and producer. Her directorial feature-length debut, Going Varsity in Mariachi, premiered at Sundance 2023 and won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. Vasquez’s short works include Folk Frontera, a surrealist film about the exchange of culture and music in the borderlands of Far West Texas that had a broadcast premiere as part of the PBS series The Latino Experience, won the SXSW Jury Award for Texas Shorts, and is taught in San Diego public schools. WHEN IT’S GOOD, IT’S GOOD has screened at the New Orleans Film Festival and BAMcinemaFest.
Vasquez’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, SFFILM, ITVS, the International Women’s Media Foundation, and more. Fellowships and residencies include the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, Film Independent Docuseries Intensive, IF/Then South Shorts, and the Catapult Research Program. Vasquez lives in Los Angeles and is developing her next feature about the green card lottery.
SABOR ARTICO: LATINOS EN ALASKA
Indra Arriaga Delgado (Director/Producer) is a Mexican artist, writer, filmmaker, and researcher working in Alaska. Arriaga Delgado has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. In 2019, she received a Rasmuson Individual Artist Award for her Etimologías Opacas/Opaque Etymologies project. Her recent film, Sabor Ártico: Latinos en Alaska, was largely funded by Latino Public Broadcasting and selected to screen in September as part of the Los Angeles New Filmmakers Festival, co-hosted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She is the recipient of a WESTAF BIPOC Artists Award 2023, and is part of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Folklife Network as a community voice.