6th Gainesville Latino Film Festival
“It’s a wonderful turnout today to see a lot of wonderful people from the Latino community, from the Gainesville community in general, too,” said festival coordinator Victoria Condor-Williams.
“They came here just to join us and to celebrate the Hispanic Heritage Month,” she said.
About 80 people wove between tables of food and wine as they waited for the opening speech by Adrian Felix and the screening of “La Mission,” the first film of six to be shown during the following five weeks.
Felix, a post doctoral associate for the Center for Latin American Studies, said he intended to speak about three issues in his preface to the film, touching on the Mexican-American or “Chicano” culture, sometimes spoken of as a gang culture; sense of homophobia and machismo pervasive in Mexican-American culture; and, finally, the setting of the film, The Mission District in San Francisco, and its history of immigration.
“Latinos are a heterogeneous, internally diverse group. I think that oftentimes people perceive Latinos as a monolithic panethnic culture, when in fact there’s a lot of internal diversity,” Felix said.
Maria Quintana, financial coordinator for the festival, said she was proud of the diversity in the crowd that showed up.
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