Latino Film Series

September 21, 2024
All films will be screened in Beers Lecture Hall and are free and open to the public.

Director Julio Torres / 104 MIN / 2024 / Spanish and English subtitles / Captions: yes

Alejandro is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador, struggling to bring his unusual ideas to life in New York City.

We live in a society that insists if you work hard, you can probably achieve the goals you've set for yourself.

But "Problemista," the first feature film by writer and comedian Julio Torres, which is now in theaters worldwide, poses the question: is working hard always enough?

Loosely based off of Torres's own immigration experience, the film follows Alejandro, an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador struggling to make his dream a reality in New York City who loses his job and desperately needs to secure a sponsor to stay in the States.

Even after taking a freelance assistant gig with an erratic art critic named Elizabeth (played by Tilda Swinton), Alejandro (played by Torres) finds himself in one of the most relentless and nightmarish mazes of American bureaucracy — the US immigration system.

Director Noam Osband and Sebastian Diaz / 77 MIN / 2024 / English and Spanish subtitles / Captions: yes

A Thousand Pines shows the lives of migrants who depend on the controversial guest worker visa program, following a crew of workers from Oaxaca, Mexico over the course of a season planting trees throughout the United States.

The crew struggles to balance the job’s physical demands and its extreme isolation while remaining connected to their families back home. As the season progresses, they become a small family, cooking and caring for each other in order to endure the punishing work.

The film centers on the crew foreman, Raymundo Morales, who is in his 19th season working for the largest reforestation company in the US. When he began, he was single and had few responsibilities.

Now, however, he must balance his obligations to his wife, his children, and his elderly mother with a heart condition, while also tending to the needs and emergencies of the planting crew.

Spending only three months at home during the off-season, Raymundo’s job is both the family’s salvation and its heartbreak.