LIFFY Rolls Back Into New Haven

In Honduras, Indigenous activist Berta Cáceres is assassinated by corporate leaders who want her dead, and it’s up to filmmaker Katia Lara to find out who did it and hold them accountable. In Argentina, thousands of mothers descend on the Plaza de Mayo to remember their disappeared children, and it is photographer Eduardo Longoni who lifts his camera, and delivers the image that puts them on the map. In Cuba, a painter loses everything in the real-life Cubana de Aviación Flight 972, and must fihure out how to move forward when the pieces of his life are everywhere.

All of those stories--and many more--are coming to New Haven next week, as the Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY) rolls into town for the 14th year in a row. The vibrant and diasporic brainchild of Margherita Tortora, this year’s festival will take place mostly on Yale’s campus, moving between 53 Wall St., the Yale Law School, Luce Hall on Hillhouse Avenue, and the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. It is free and open to the public. 

This year, it is dedicated to the memory of LIFFY juror and team member Fabiola Rinaudo and Peruvian filmmaker Felipe Degregori. For the fourth year in a row, the festival will also offer a selection of its works virtually, to open LIFFY up to an audience that can’t be physically in New Haven. After making the online pivot during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Tortora said she heard from educators around the country that LIFFY’s films are a teaching tool.

“I want people to see real representation of the great variety of people who speak Spanish and Portuguese, or are of Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian heritage, Caribbean heritage, to see themselves reflected on the big screen,” said Tortora, a lifelong New Havener and senior lecturer in Spanish at Yale, in an interview at her York Street office Wednesday. “For many in New Haven, especially in the schools, they don’t normally see themselves reflected. Like, here’s a Dominican kid who is in a film! I just think that’s a real core thing.”

It has been, for almost a decade and a half, a labor of love that Tortora does almost entirely on her own. In September of 2010, LIFFY was born as the New England Festival of Ibero-American Cinema (NEFIAC), a multi-day film festival held between Brown and Yale Universities. When Tortora’s collaborator at Brown left the university, she thought about ending the festival, but ultimately decided to keep it going for both Yale and the wider New Haven community. If she doesn’t do it, she asked aloud Wednesday, who will?

As in years past, Yale has come onboard with support of the festival, including opening its residential colleges to visiting filmmakers. Tortora has also cultivated immense community pride, from Soul de Cuba Cafe owner Jesus Puerto to gallery owner Gabriel Da Silva to Yorkside Pizza’s George Koutroumanis.

Luis Luna, now a statewide coalition manager for Husky 4 Immigrants, began attending in 2010, after spotting a flier for it downtown. Over a decade later, he said, it’s one of the most meaningful parts of his year. After coming to the U.S. from Ecuador at 13, it helps him feel close to home.

“For me, it’s the connective tissue to Latin America that I miss,” he said, adding that he's become something of a super-volunteer, with contacts in film who now span the Latin American diaspora. “I came to the U.S. at a young age, when I was trying to figure out who I was as an immigrant. Watching the films, I think about who I would have become had I stayed in Ecuador. These films … they transport you. They take you somewhere else.”

That power to teach, to transport, and to catalyze discussion is also what keeps Tortora coming back to program the festival each year. While she recommends all of the 2023 festival films, she said, she’s particularly excited for this year’s focus on documentary storytelling and ability to speak truth to power, often with the filmmakers in the audience. 

She praised jurors Greta Schiller, Antonio Tibaldi, and Eva Zelig for their assistance, noting that there are certain works she’s especially looking forward to.   

On the festival’s opening night, for instance, she will welcome photographer Eduardo Longoni with a rotating exhibition of his work, followed by a screening of Una mirada honesta/ An Honest Look. The documentary explores Longoni’s long and storied career, from the mothers in Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo to some of the most iconic moments in Argentine soccer history. In addition to the film, Longoni himself will be speaking about his work, which has spanned four decades and chronicled dozens of moments in the country’s history and memory. 

That’s just the tip of the cinematic iceberg, she said. On Wednesday Nov. 1, Tortora will welcome Honduran director Katia Lara for a screening of Berta Soy Yo, a documentary that traces the extraordinary life and advocacy of Berta Cáceres, an Indigenous Lenca activist and water protector who was assassinated in March 2016 at the age of 44.  In the work, Lara follows Cáceres’ path, uncovering the corporate business interests behind her killing. 

It is a film that not only centers Indigenous rights, Tortora said, but also holds big business accountable for the environmental harm that has come to the country.  “They may have sent the henchmen from the mountains and the gangs to kill her, but people in suits are the ones who ordered her killing,” she said. Before the screening, Lara will be in conversation with María Aguilar Velasquez, a visiting professor at Yale who is also an Indigenous Maya Kʼicheʼ activist from Guatemala, about historical violence in central America. 

Several of this year’s films address Indigeneity and activism. On Tuesday, Oct. 31, Tortora will present to Shur Abelinui wam yo kutri kitrop pichip/Braiding the thought of shur Abelino, a work from Colombian director José Antonio Dorado Zúñiga that seeks to tell the story of the Misak people through the story of Abelino Dagua. Then on Nov. 4 at noon, New Haven-based filmmaker Steve Hamm will show his 51-minute film Mundo Maya, documenting the life (and at points, migration patterns) of Maya people living in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula today.  

On Nov. 2, Tortora is also excited for the screening of Facing the Silence/Frente al silencio, a 2022 documentary from Emilio Ruíz Barrachina that comes out of Spain. Set in the present, the film follows Fuensanta "La Moneta," a flamenco dancer in Granata whose approach to the art form--and to life--is transformed when fellow dancer and flamenco student Yarden Amir gives her a copy of Félix Grande’s La cabellera de la Shoá. 

The book, which chronicles the horrors of visiting Auschwitz, remains with La Moneta long after she has read it, and ultimately compels her to visit the camp herself. As she returns to Spain, the film captures her process of building a dance in response to the space, and specifically to the mountains of Gypsy hair that are now on display.  A performance from Amir, to be held at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life on Wall Street, is part of the event. 

Tortora noted that while LIFFY's selections may sound heavy, interspersed throughout are several screenings and discussions that she expects to be “a lot of fun.” On Nov. 2, LIFFY is collaborating with the New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) and ARTE, Inc. to show Croma Kid, a 2023 film from Dominican director Pablo Chea, for 350 public school students at 53 Wall St. 

The next day, the festival will take the film to East Haven High School, where students can speak with Croma Kid actor Bosco Cárdenas and co-script writer and director of photography Israel Cárdenas about the work. Tortora, who grew up in New Haven, noted how happy she is to bring the work to East Haven, which has a large Latino population.

“The kids from the public schools will see that it’s someone like them that they can talk to and that’s making movies,” she said.

That spirit of representation, more broadly, is one of the reasons that she carries LIFFY forward every year. She can feel it pulsing through films from Cuba, through celebrations of Latino and LGBTQ+ representation that are still forbidden in some countries, through Héctor Valdez’ Diáspora, which was made in the Dominican Republic last year. 

In the works, she said, she sees the vibrancy and complexity of life. She hopes that New Haveners will too.

“I think it’s really educational,” she said. “I think, you know, when you see it on the screen, you reflect and talk about it.” 

The Latino and Iberian Film Festival at Yale (LIFFY) runs Oct. 30 to Nov. 5 at various buildings around Yale University’s campus; all screenings are free and open to the public. A full schedule is available here.