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Virtual Film Festival Week 1

Date: April 1, 2020 - April 4, 2020

This online festival has been custom curated for the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC-Chapel Hill. The link to the film festival is below at the Read More button! The password to access is isa-connect-20

Two films will be available each week from March 29 – April 18, 2020.

March 29-April 4

“The Rest I Make Up”

A film by Michelle Memran. 2018. 79 minutes.

Maria Irene Fornes was one of America’s greatest playwrights and most influential teachers, but many know her only as the ex-lover of writer and social critic Susan Sontag. The visionary Cuban-American dramatist constructed astonishing worlds on stage, writing over 40 plays and winning nine Obie Awards. At the vanguard of the nascent Off-Off Broadway experimental theater movement in New York, Fornes is often referred to as American theater’s “Mother Avant-Garde.” When she gradually stops writing due to dementia, an unexpected friendship with filmmaker Michelle Memran reignites her spontaneous creative spirit and triggers a decade-long collaboration that picks up where the pen left off.

The duo travels from New York to Havana, Miami to Seattle, exploring the playwright’s remembered past and their shared present. Theater luminaries such as Edward Albee, Ellen Stewart, Lanford Wilson, and others weigh in on Fornes’ important contributions. What began as an accidental collaboration becomes a story of love, creativity, and connection that persists even in the face of forgetting.

“Ni Aquí, Ni Allá”

A film by Gabriela Bortolamedi. 2014. 24 minutes.

“Ni aquí, ni allá” illuminates the challenges facing an undocumented college student and her family. Blanca, a second-year student at the University of California, Berkeley, crossed the border from Mexico into the United States with her parents when she was a child. As a student under the California Dream Act who possess DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Blanca qualifies for financial aid and has temporary protection from deportation, though her undocumented parents, who live and work in California's agricultural Central Valley, do not. “Ni aquí, ni allá” paints an intimate portrait of an undocumented family as they support each other during a turning point in their lives and stay together through the distance. At a time in this country’s history where the debate around immigration is highly contested and demands to close the border are in the daily news, “Ni aquí, ni allá” offers a very human face on an issue national debate.