Jane Wells has devoted a decade to documenting human rights abuses throughout the world. She served as producer on The Devil Came on Horseback, a chronicle of the genocide in Darfur, and most recently directed the feature documentary Tricked, about sex trafficking in the United States. While working on the…
Several years ago, when Adán De La Garza and Christina Battle moved to Denver from cities with vibrant media arts communities, they sought out the same thing here. They did not find it. As video artists, they craved an artistic network, a local scene where they could bounce off ideas…
Whether you are interested in cultural documentaries, classic dramas or anti-colonial revenge films, this year’s XicanIndie Film Festival promises to showcase the most innovative and intriguing Latino, Chicano and global indigenous films. Here are five must-see selections from the festival, which starts tonight; head to Su Teatro to see the…
Aspen Shortsfest program director George Eldred is hesitant to pick a favorite from among the film festival’s offerings this year. “Winnowing down 3,000 to seventy — they’re all our children. Like any proud parent, you wouldn’t want to play favorites,” he says. “There are some really standout pieces from lots…
“Unless a film is put in the white man’s context, it’s not significant; it’s a subtle kind of racism,” says XicanIndie Film Festival curator and filmmaker Daniel Salazar, speaking of movies about Latinos, such as Buena Vista Social Club, that feature white characters for white audiences to relate to. Most…
Sound has a quasi-imperialistic property, says Adán de la Garza, co-curator of Loud!!!, a video-art show about sound. In a movie screening, if you dislike what you see, you can close your eyes, but you cannot close your ears, he points out. “The person who is emitting the sound is…
Whether it’s baseball, burgers or men in uniforms, the Colorado Rockies’ season opener against the Arizona Diamondbacks has something for everyone to love. And this year, Coors Field will be showing off a brand-new, 38,000-square-foot rooftop deck that boasts “incredible panoramic views of the Front Range and downtown Denver,” says…
In his tenth year as curator of the XicanIndie Film Festival, Daniel Salazar decided to revamp the whole project. Working with film programmers from all over the Americas, Salazar created the Encuentro Mundial de Cine, an international curatorial collaboration using digital platforms to broaden the pool of films available to…
When he hit rock bottom, DIY zine-maker and literary adventurer Justin Hocking started taking evening jaunts from New York City to Rockaway Beach, where he surfed the waves under the moonlit sky. He defied death; he navigated trauma; he searched the shadows of his soul. This period of self-exploration launched…
Are you a prudish nostalgic looking to sip some tea, nibble on crumpets and harken back to the good old days when servants were servants, aristocrats were aristocrats and monarchs bred with each other over and over and over again, holding onto their estates through thinly veiled incest? Do you…
“Should I write movies or work for a production company?” a fresh-faced Miguel Ali (formerly Miguel Ali Hasan) asked his professor, John Badham, the director of Short Circuit and Saturday Night Fever. Badham replied: “Go get some life experience. It will make you a better director.” So Ali did: He…
“I was robbed at gunpoint in 2006 and went into an emotional tailspin,” says author Justin Hocking about the impetus for his memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld. In response, he embarked on late-night treks from his home in New York City to Rockaway Beach to surf in the…
What could delight an Anglophile more than spending an afternoon sipping tea and reading Jane Austen? Try three cups of tea and the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of her autumnal novel, Persuasion — a witty tale of heartache and love sure to titillate the prim and proper romantic in us all…
One hundred years after the Colorado National Guard, along with goons hired by mining magnate John D. Rockefeller, murdered striking coal miners and their children in the southern Colorado town of Ludlow, Su Teatro Cultural and Performing Arts Center is premiering Ludlow: El Grito de Las Minas, a play about…
Chuckling in libraries and meeting halls since 1979, members of the Jane Austen Society of North America have been digging deep into the English novelist’s classic tales of romance amongst the British landed gentry. In advance of the March 30Alamo Drafthouse Cinema screening of the BBC’s 1995 adaptation of Austen’s…
As an obituary writer, Bruce Weber confronts mortality more than most. So he decided to bid farewell to middle age by taking a cross-country bike trip which he used to reflect on aging and mortality in his memoir: Life Is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Trip Across…
When she was in high school, Favianna Rodriguez’s parents wanted her to study to become a doctor. They supported her creativity, but subjected her to a string of math and science camps that monopolized her time. As an A+, super-star student, she went to college, found herself pregnant, had an…
When DeVotchKa’sShawn King approached Raul Pacheco to collaborate, he accepted the invitation with open arms. Despite being in the middle of recording, releasing and then touring for Ozomatli’s new album, Place in the Sun, Pacheco carved out time to work on Dreaming Sin Fronteras: Stories of Immigration and American Identity,…
As an obituary writer for the New York Times, Bruce Weber contemplates mortality more than most. For example, in 1993, at the age of 39, he packed his saddlebags and rode his bike across the United States as a way to salute his youth and pedal into middle age. He…
DeVoktchKa’s Shawn King may not think too highly of didactic protest songs, but he has devoted himself to Dreaming Sin Fronteras: Stories of Immigration and American Identity, a massive theatrical collaboration about “dreamers”: undocumented students who have been in the United States since they were children and are seeking a…
Your story matters, says poet Yosimar Reyes, who denies the dominant narrative of United States citizenship, that “real Americans” are blue-eyed, blond-haired, white, upper-middle class men fully assimilated into the American Dream. This isn’t historical; this isn’t reality, he says:This is a nation founded on immigrants. Living in the United…
Artists often choose to take big risks: In 1971, Chris Burden made art history when he had his assistant shoot him in the arm; just last November, Petr Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to Moscow’s Red Square cobblestones. These artists’ transgressions were aesthetic choices; when Julio Salgado, who migrated to the…
