The Watsonville Film Festival started with a conversation in 2012 between the event's co-founder and executive director Consuelo Alba and a friend of hers. Alba said she had no idea that the festival would still be going strong 14 years later:
Consuelo Alba: We thought we would do it once, but then when we presented the Watsonville Film Festival the first time at the Mello Center, the response was incredible. There was electricity in the room. Everybody was excited. We had families there. We had kids saying, "I want to be a filmmaker." So this beautiful energy really inspired us to continue the festival year after year.
Year after year, the festival comes up with a different theme. This year's theme is "art as resistance." Alba explained why they came up with that theme this year:
Alba: We saw these constant attacks against the immigrant communities, against people of color. So this is how we resist, through our art, through our stories, through film.
Click the audio player at the top of this story to listen to the interview or read the highlights below. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the films being screened at the festival this year is called The Long Labor:
It is a short documentary about a local midwife named Maria Ramos who assists farm workers in the area to help them give birth aligned with their indigenous traditions. Here in a scene from the film, Ramos talks about the work she does:
Ramos, in The Long Labor: We can start showing up in a way that the community is telling us that they need, especially the most oppressed women of Watsonville. That has been my priority.
Filmmaker Brenda Avila-Hanna co-produced The Long Labor and said she was very inspired by Ramos's story.
Avila-Hanna: We saw the labor that she was doing that was very life-affirming. When everything else fails, people who are used to being in the margins, they are actually the people we need to follow. We follow their lead because they know how to survive. They know how to take care of one another. And it's a little glimpse into what that work looks like.
Another film being screened at the festival is a long-form documentary called Libertad.
Brenda Avila-Hanna directed Libertad, which focuses on Alejandra Santiago, a Oaxacan-born transgender woman living in Santa Cruz who paved the way for gender reassignment surgery in California. Santiago says that just existing as the person she is feels like an act of resistance these days:
Alejandra Santiago: I am a transgender person. I am an immigrant. Sometimes I'm scared. Sometimes I'm fearful of walking on the street or being stopped by immigration. But then I think, well, I have to be brave and say I'm part of the community if immigration stops me, then I can have a voice to say, "Hey, just don't stop me because of the way I look. Don't stop me because of who I am, because that's wrong."
The Watsonville Film Festival, which features over fifty films, opens tonight at Green Valley Cinema in Watsonville and continues through March 21 at various locations in Watsonville, Salinas and Santa Cruz.
