The Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective is turning 10! The New York City-based group has been working now for a decade to support its members. Described as “a consensus-based group that values equitable interactions and diverse voices,” the collective is celebrating with a series of screening events throughout the city all summer. Up next is an event over at BAM titled “Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective Presents: Reconciliation in Four Shorts.” Featuring the work of four Latina filmmakers the shorts and excerpts selected explore themes of family values, migration, and identity. A Q&A with the directors will follow.
Lindsey Cordero and Armando Croda will be showing an excerpt of their film Firmes: Mexican Low-Riders in the Bronx. The documentary follows a tight-knit group of Mexican immigrants who are lowrider enthusiasts in New York City and are doing their best to survive, working hard to support families, facing ghosts of the gang life they’ve left behind, and deferring dreams in a country that is not theirs. United by their love for art, culture, and Mexican traditions, they have forged strong bonds and formed a solid community. Together they reinterpret what it means to be Mexican within the complex urban landscape of New York City.
Also showing an excerpt from her first feature film is Cecilia Aldarondo. She’ll be presenting her family album-cum-documentary Memories of a Penitent of Heart. The intimately personal doc follows Aldarondo as she tries to learn more about her uncle who died in New York City away from his family in Puerto Rico at the height of the AIDS crisis. Knowing the hushed whispers around him suggested family trauma that had yet to be worked through, the filmmaker followed leads and photos from her native Puerto Rico all the way to California where she found his lover, who’d been shunned after her uncle’s death. It’s a story as heartbreaking as it is uplifting.
Treading slightly different queer ground is Arisleyda Dilone‘s Mami y Yo y Gallito (Mom and Me and My Little Rooster). The short film follows the filmmaker’s conversation with her immigrant mother about her intersex body. It’s the kind of personal-driven narratives that characterize the projects being showcased at BAM. Lorena Alvarado‘s short film Comrades, for example, finds the Caracas-born filmmaker turning the camera on her family following the death of her grandfather. As he grandmother’s mental health deteriorates, she finds her housekeeper beginning to fill in the missing spaces of the life she leads.
Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective Presents: Reconciliation in Four Shorts takes place July 31, 2018 at BAM.