With the ongoing pandemic, there will be no red carpet rolled out at the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, but the celebration of cinema continues. Sundance will take place virtually and at satellite theaters across the country next month. Here’s a look at some of the Latino films and Latino actors and directors who will take part.
Legendary Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno is featured in the documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It. Directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, the film takes viewers through the EGOT winner’s illustrious career.
In Jockey, Mexican-American actor Clifton Collins Jr. (Capote) stars as a seasoned horse jockey whose health is declining. He begins to think about his legacy when a young jockey (Colombian-American actor Moisés Arias) shows up and claims to be his son.
Afro-Latina actress Tessa Thompson (Creed) plays an upper-class woman in the 1920s who reunites with an old classmate and must come to terms with her racial identity in Passing.
Mexican actor and comedian Eugenio Derbez (Overboard) has a supporting role as an enthusiastic albeit tough choirmaster in the film Coda, which tells the story of a teenage girl who is the only hearing member of a deaf family.
Oscar-nominated Mexican actor Demián Bichir (A Better Life) has a role in actress Robin Wright’s (The Princess Bride) directorial debut Land, about a woman who goes off into the wilderness and leaves her old life behind.
Actor Fred Armisen (TV’s Portlandia), who is Venezuelan, German and Korean, has a supporting role in the film How it Ends, about a woman who journeys through Los Angeles before the end of the world.
Sons of Monarchs, which earned the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, is a documentary about a Mexican biologist living in New York who returns to his hometown of Michoacán to face past traumas.
El Salvadoran writer, actor and comedian Julio Torres (TV’s Los Espookys) has a role in the film Together Together, about a young woman hired as a surrogate for a single man in his 40s.
Cuban-American twin sisters Alessandra Mesa (And the Boys Go) and Ani Mesa (Maternal) star in Superior as estranged twins who live totally opposite lives.
Other Latino films on the slate include Argentina’s The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet and Brazil’s The Pink Cloud, which are part of the World Cinema Dramatic competition. U.S. documentaries competing this year include At the Ready about students in El Paso participating in a law enforcement education program; Rebel Hearts about a group of pioneering nuns directed by Brazilian filmmaker Pedro Kos; Homeroom about the students who graduated from Oakland High School in 2020; and Users, a U.S.-Mexico production about motherhood.
Audiences also might want to check out Pacho Velez’s documentary Searchers about New Yorkers using dating apps and Philly D.A., co-created by Nicole Salazar, a doc on Philadelphia’s District Attorney Larry Krasner.
The Sundance Film Festival takes place Jan. 28 – Feb. 3, 2021 online and at satellite theaters across the United States.