21st Cine Las Americas Honors Latino, Indigenous Cinema

Running from May 2 to 6 in the U.S. city of Austin, Texas, The 21st Annual Cine Las Americas International Film Festival is showcasing feature films, documentaries, music videos and short films from across the Latin American world, as well as Spain and Portugal.

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Two of the most critically acclaimed films that will play at the festival are “Summer 1993” and “Guilty Men,” the official foreign language Oscar nominees for Spain and Colombia, respectively, according to The Austin Chronicle.

Jean Anne Lauer, the festival's director, said she is “routinely” asked if all of the “films in Spanish? And I always say no. We have Spanish and Portuguese, never mind that we're standing where Latinos speak English, and we also have all the indigenous languages of the Americas."

Other films on the roster include: 2 Spirit Dreamcatcher Dot Com (by Thirza Cuthand); Dance with Your Heart (Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi); Nothing is Left but Our Tenderness (Sebastien Jallade); Young and Miserable or a Man Screaming Is Not a Dancing Bear (by Thiago B. Mendonca); and The Great Atikamekw Lady (by Sipi Flamand).

Films will be showcased at three primary venues: the AFS Cinema, MASS Gallery and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center.

For over two decades, Cine Las Americas has been a beacon of light for Indigenous points of view and voices from Latin America and beyond that have been frequently shunned by the large film studies and big screens in the United States and elsewhere.

The festival is also hosting Femmer Frontera Showcase, a special program highlighting seven films by female filmmakers based on the Mexico-U.S. border who take to task cultural and gender sterotypes.