Introducing our PHLAFF24 Los Fellows!
Hola Familia! We recently announced and congratulated our Los Fellows Program Selectees!
Now we are excited to give Erik Martinez, Alejandro Jimenez, and Iliana Teitelbaum the opportunity to elaborate on some of the details and goals of their respective projects in their own words!
The Los Fellows Program (managed in collaboration with PhillyCAM) focuses on co-creation opportunities, supports and bridges to support Latine/x/a/o creatives in their practice and part of PHLAFF’s commitment to enhance the generative impact of the festival. This program functions as a platform for emerging and interdisciplinary and to develop and showcase their creativity while contributing to the advancement of Latine/x/a/o arts, culture and diasporic reflections in Philadelphia and beyond.
As part of this effort, fellowships will also be aligned with specific impact-focused outcomes that further the development of the individual’s practice while also upholding and advancing the mission of the Philadelphia Latino Arts & Film Festival.
Erik Martinez
“My proposed project for the fellowship is a published research that gathers stories in many forms —interviews, prose, poetry, archive footage, illustrations— around / inspired by Dominican movie theaters from the history and cultural imaginary of my country. The idea of the project is to thread together the history of cinema, the history of my country, and the personal stories of those who live it. It is also an attempt to give birth to new stories and ways of creation, not through cinema, but because of it. It is important for me to tell stories that, even while taking place around cinema as a pretext, are more preoccupied with the personal lives of the people experiencing it.”
Alejandro Jimenez
“I am a cinematographer and documentary director and I want to tell my experience first-hand, and through the eyes of my friends, of being in a coma for 54 days in a row, a time where I fought for my life through horror, pain and powerful hallucinations. that will be told through animations. But it was also a time filled with beautiful moments of connection with my community of friends, who came together to support me. I hope to tell the story through my own testimony and that of those who witnessed my recovery process, in order to show other people that dreams can be achieved.”
Illiana Teitelbaum
“Far from home, where your culture is not valued, your children are learning English and forgetting their native language. Can they gain a new language without losing their mother tongue? Will they lose touch with their native culture as they gain a new one? “Twin Tongues/Lenguas Gemelas” is a nonfiction film that explores the efforts of a Puerto Rican-Peruvian family to preserve their native Spanish language as their children enter the English-language schooling system in the United States. We follow a pair of twins to discover their experiences learning English in first grade. The first part of the film “Familia” introduces a Hispanic family in the diaspora of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The second part of the film “Escuela” follows a pair of 7-year-old Spanish-speaking boy and girl twins into the English-language system of a Philadelphia public school. Part three of the film “Raíces” travels to post-hurricane Puerto Rico to understand how Spanish became a language of resistance in the Caribbean colony, while it is the language of oppression in Andean Peru. The film interrogates how racist discourses have caused language loss in indigenous, Jewish, and Hispanic migrant communities. It advocates for the right to speak non-dominant languages, as it wrestles with the high-stakes choices that speakers make in relation to their languages today. Shot in the US, Puerto Rico, and Peru, “Twin Tongues” explores the risks of language loss as well as the value of bilingualism in a globalized world.”