This fall, Trinity is hosting its inaugural Spanish Film Festival in collaboration with PRAGDA, a Spanish film distributor. Organized by assistant professor of Spanish Mónica Ocasio Vega, the festival is part of PRAGDA’s international “Spanish Film Club” series, which brings contemporary Latin American and Spanish stories to American universities.
With input from Associate Professor of Modern Language and Literature Ana Maria Mutis, who teaches the Latin American Cinema class, Ocasio said she selected a lineup of seven films to showcase the diversity of Spanish-speaking cultures across Latin America and Spain. Since late September, the fest has featured three films: “We Shall Not be Moved,” “Boca Chica” and “Monos.”
“It was important … to do a selection that made sense for students at Trinity,” Ocasio said. “Ana Maria and I thought the best way to go about it was to make it a survey of different film industries in Latin America. We start with Mexico, then move to the Dominican Republic.”
At 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 26, the festival continued with a screening of “Boca Chica,” followed by a virtual Q&A with director Gabriella Moses. Set in a Dominican beach town, the coming-of-age drama centers on 12-year-old Desi (Scarlet Camilo). In a post-film Q&A, Moses said that Desi pursues her passion for music over the course of the film, amid fraught family dynamics and the encroaching realities of womanhood in a society shaped by exploitation.
Ocasio, whose research centers on the foodways and culture of her native Puerto Rico, said she found the film’s “touristy” setting particularly resonant.
“One of the things that I look at in my research in the Caribbean … is the consumption of Caribbean bodies,” Ocasio Vega said. “Within that tourism economy, two things then stood out to me. One is the idea of the consumption of food, but also the consumption of gendered bodies, in this case, the Black woman.”
In the film, Desi’s mother, Carmen (Lia Chapman), and aunt, Nena (Ziomara Rodriguez), co-own a restaurant that caters to American tourists. Ocasio recalled that during the Q&A, Moses said that this detail was designed to represent cultural transactions and power dynamics.
“I really like the way that the director posits the sisters,” Ocasio said. “These two women own a restaurant that focuses on a tourist clientele and simultaneously embody this traumatic history of the consumption of the Black Dominican female body, but also find a certain economic freedom through cooking.”
In the film’s final scene, Desi chooses to leave Boca Chica to avoid falling victim to dangerous social expectations and pursue her dreams. As her bus pulls away, the camera lingers on three girls on a swing set, before cutting to black. Ocasio said that she found this visual contrast poignant.
“For Desi to experience girlhood, she has to leave her home because otherwise she won’t. If she stays there, as we saw, she’s going to be obligated to transition into womanhood,” Ocasio said. “That is her reality, and it’s also the reality of a diasporic subject. A lot of people from the Dominican Republic, from Haiti, from Puerto Rico, we are not able to grow old in our home countries … So it is a sad story. Because it reconfigures the concept of home.”
Students who attended the screening said the film left a lasting impression. Julianna Hildebrand, sophomore religion and sociology double-major, said she was deeply moved by Desi’s plight. To Hildebrand, Desi’s story revealed the forces at work within Boca Chica that normalize exploitation.
“I haven’t been subject to that kind of treatment, so it was striking to me. I knew that [trafficking] existed, but it was remarkable,” Hildebrand said. “It opened my eyes to see it exist, and at such a young age.”
Clover Focke, sophomore sociology major, also attended the “Boca Chica” screening. They said that they were stunned by Moses’s visual language and felt particularly impacted by the scene where Desi is left to wait outside of a club while her cousin does illicit business inside.
“It made me want to cry because I feel like every girl knows someone who’s had that experience,” Focke said. “Also, I feel like it’s hard watching this 12-going-on-13-year-old girl be sexualized in such a way. It was a very powerful scene to me. I feel like every girl in the theater could relate to that.”
The festival’s next screening will be next week on Oct. 16. “Bacarau” (2019) is a “weird western” film by Brazilian filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles.
