Written by Sara Michelle Fetters
Editor-in-Chief
www.moviefreak.com
Normally this would be too small a title for me to include, but I have to say this little documentary really blew me away something fierce so I’m listing it in this week’s column all the same. The film follows Alejandro Santiago, a middle-aged artist from Oaxaca, Mexico who returns home after a brief exile in France to find a virtual ghost town. Everyone has left to become a day laborer in the United States leaving storefronts vacant and homes empty. Inspired by this, he creates 2,501 …

2,501 Migrants: A Journey, a documentary film by Yolanda Cruz, looks at global migration through the eyes of Oaxacan artist, Alejandro Santiago. Available on DVD September 14.

Checking In…Yolanda Cruz

July 20, 2010
This month we check in with the Native Program.  In May of this year, Bird Runningwater, director of Sundance Institute’s Native & Indigenous Program gathered a group of four fellows and three advisors in the beautiful lands of the Mescalero-Apache people in New Mexico.
Bird explains the lab in this way: “In Apache we refer to life’s journey as Nda’i bijuuł sia’, which speaks to “life’s living circle.”  The Native Program at Sundance Institute is also a part of a circle: one that begins with a filmmaker’s own point …

Yolanda Cruz: Reel Chatino Women Have Nerve
By: Olga García Echeverría
I’m not really sure if real women have to have curves (I know some flacas who are pretty chingonas), but in my opinion female filmmakers, especially indigenous female filmmakers like Yolanda Cruz, have to have a lot of nerve.
Film, afterall, has traditionally been a male-dominated field, and when we consider the historical representations of indigenous people in the media, such as the stereotypical savage or the noble indian, we can appreciate the challenges faced by contemporary filmmakers like Cruz.
Yolanda, though, isn’t …