Dolores Huerta, iconic labor activist, inspires LA crowd at Poitier Film School screening event
Filmmakers and Borderlands Cinematic Arts founders Alex Rivera (left) and Cristina Ibarra talk on stage at the "Dolores" screening event at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in downtown Los Angeles on Sept. 16. Photo courtesy of The Sidney Poitier New American Film School
During times of crisis and violence, how can cinema depict — and inspire — resistance and social change?
For Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera — and the crowd at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in downtown Los Angeles on Sept. 16 — that inspiration can be found in the film “Dolores” and its subject, iconic labor activist Dolores Huerta.
“This film is a bridge between the past and what’s happening now,” Ibarra said.
She and Rivera, both associate professors with The Sidney Poitier New American Film School at Arizona State University and founders of Borderlands Cinematic Arts, welcomed Huerta for a special screening of the 2017 documentary about her life and work.
The MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellows created Borderlands Cinematic Arts to be a first-of-its-kind space for mid-career filmmakers to create new cinematic works that are grounded in the social experience of the “borderlands” and elevated in craft and form.
"There's a lot of pain in LA right now, and a lot of pain in the world,” Rivera told Huerta. “There’s a hunger for the wisdom you carry.”
Huerta, now 95, has worked over seven decades as an American labor leader and activist, co-founding the National Farm Workers Association (now United Farm Workers) with fellow activist Cesar Chavez.
“Our day has arrived to stand up for freedom, to stand up for democracy, to stand up for those people who are being persecuted,” Huerta said.
Filmmaker, Rockefeller Fellow and Peabody Award winner Peter Bratt was on hand to introduce the film he directed. Last year, Bratt was named one of four inaugural Borderlands Visionary Fellows. Fellows receive an unrestricted grant of $50,000 to support the development of original films, as well as access to Poitier Film School resources, including state-of-the-art studios, virtual production stages, sound mixing and color correction facilities, and digital camera equipment.
Bratt first met Huerta as a child through his own mother’s activism, which also took him at age 7 to the Occupation of Alcatraz, a 19-month-long occupation of Alcatraz Island by Indigenous tribes and their supporters in the early 1970s. But it was musician Carlos Santana, who served as executive producer on the film, who encouraged Bratt to tell Huerta’s story.
“Carlos Santana called me and said we have to tell Dolores’ story while she’s still with us,” Bratt said.
Bratt said while he was researching for the film, he was shocked to discover the ways in which Huerta had been erased from the public record.
“We have to say it; we have to show it with archive footage, that she was there,” Bratt said, adding that his film is about “this thread of reclaiming identity and physical space, and reclaiming dignity. ”
Huerta received her due that night. After the screening, over 200 audience members leapt to their feet to give Huerta a rousing standing ovation. Afterwards, she joined Bratt, Ibarra and Rivera for a post-screening discussion exploring how documentary storytelling can be a tool for educating, organizing and mobilizing.
“Tonight was such an inspiring evening because it reminds us that we are actively writing history,” said Peter Murrieta, deputy director of The Poitier Film School and interim associate dean of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts in LA. “History is happening right now, all around us.
"People like Dolores Huerta and films like ‘Dolores’ remind us that art and activism go hand in hand, that we have a voice and that voice has power.”
Ibarra and Rivera will continue the conversation Thursday, Oct. 9, when they appear again at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center for a screening and discussion of their 2019 film “The Infiltrators.” The real-life story — half documentary, half dramatic narrative — is about a group of young undocumented activists who deliberately get detained by Border Patrol to infiltrate a for-profit detention center to help liberate detainees. Like “Dolores,” “The Infiltrators” has gained new urgency.
“Telling our stories like we’ve done in this documentary is really important so we can see it and we can all become messengers to change society,” Huerta said. “To me, finding that people could come together and change things — it was like magic to me. We solved problems by getting together and doing the work.”
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