01.30.2025 | By Jack Rico |
The 2025 Sundance Film Festival is underway, and I’ve just screened four standout Latino short films that offer a powerful window into the struggles and dreams of the Latino experience in America. Having covered Latino cinema for 20 years, these “mini-películas” provide a barometer of where Latino storytelling is today and where it is headed.
Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado (Director and Screenwriter: Natalia León, Producer: Luc Camilli)
Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado
Directed and written by Natalia León, Como si la tierra se las hubiera tragado is a powerful and deeply sensitive animated short that explores Mexican femicides and the raw struggle to forget such trauma. Unlike the recent backlash surrounding Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” this short handles the topic with remarkable depth and sensitivity.
En Memoria (Director, Screenwriter, and Producer: Roberto Fatal, Screenwriter and Producer: Ali Meyers-Ohki, Producer: Leah Dubuc)
Director Roberto Fatal‘s quinceañera sci-fi is not what you expect from a quinceañera movie. In En Memoria, he envisions a dystopian future where a Mexican-American mother’s struggle to complete a quinceañera dress chillingly underscores a government-funded future where memories are commodities, exchanged as loan collateral, offering a cruel yet disturbing glimpse into the future of societal control.
Trokas Duras (Director and Screenwriter: Jazmin Garcia, Screenwriter: Benjamin Benji Moreno)
‘Trokas Duras’
Arguably the most visionary Latino short of the Sundance slate, Trokas Duras invites us to see the universal human capacity to dream beyond societal limits through the eyes of a group of “jornaleros” in Los Angeles. With a fresh, cinematic perspective, the short establishes writer and director Jazmin García as a leading voice of a new wave of Latina filmmakers.
SUSANA (Directors, Screenwriters, and Producers: Gerardo Coello Escalante, Amandine Thomas, Producers: Mariana Tames, Fernanda Preciado, Hannah Swayze)
Bonnie Hellman Brown appears in SUSANA
In a refreshing role reversal, filmmakers Gerardo Coello Escalante and Amandine Thomas tell the story of SUSANA, an American tourist’s solo trip to Mexico City that takes an unexpected turn when she meets a group of young Americans who betray her newfound sense of connection. Abandoned by her own culture, she finds unexpected kindness from Mexicans, creating a profound questioning of her American identity, and sense of belonging.
Overall, these four short films showcase a bold new wave of Latino filmmakers who are reinventing old Hollywood Latino tropes and subverting them using genres like animation, cinema verité, and science fiction to explore themes of trauma, control, identity, and belonging. If these Sundance shorts are any sign, the future of Latino cinema will be in great hands.
