26th Cine Las Americas International Film Festival

Program

The 8th annual Femme Frontera Filmmaker Showcase features short films by women and non-binary filmmakers from the U.S.-Mexico border regions of El Paso, Texas, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México.

Desi, a 12-year old girl, spends her days dreaming on the beaches of Boca Chica of becoming a famous singer, but her goal is threatened by the insidious future that awaits some of the girls in her town. A future that is perpetruated by some of those closest to her. Only her music can save her. Juxtaposing the realities and expectations of a young girls in the Dominican Republic, Boca Chica shines a light on the insidious child sex trade and the lives it seeks to destroy.

"A stunning tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life - SUGARCANE, the debut feature documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie - is an epic cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning. Set amidst a ground-breaking investigation into abuse and death at an Indian residential school, the film empowers participants to break cycles of intergenerational trauma by bearing witness to painful, long-ignored truths – and the love that endures within their families despite the revelation of genocide. In 2021, evidence of unmarked graves near an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada sparked a national outcry about the forced separation, assimilation, and abuse many children experienced at this network of segregated boarding schools designed to slowly destroy the culture and social fabric of Indigenous communities. When Kassie- a journalist and filmmaker- asked her old friend and colleague, NoiseCat, to direct a film documenting the Williams Lake First Nation investigation of St Joseph’s Mission, she never imagined just how close this story was to his own family."

The films are personal and each telling rich stories that will resonate with viewers. The works screened in this category are eligible for a Jury Award for Best Narrative Short.