1	Music The duality of Alejandro Fernández; Camila’s big changes; Rodrigo y Gabriela keep it green. read more...
2	Books Legendary music producer Emilio Estefan shares his life lessons. read more...
3	Arts Franck de Las Mercedes’ project for peace. read more...
4	Film & TV Andy Garcia shares the big screen with his real-life daughter in his latest independent flick; an emerging documentarian confronts her past; Martha Higareda on DVD. read more...
5	Calendar Our monthly list of premier events. read more...
6	Picture This A new interpretation of the iconic Carmen. read more...

LATIN FORUM {Film & tv}

The Family dynamic

Andy Garcia and Dominik Garcia-Lorido play off of their real life father-daughter family ties for their new roles in City Island.

As one of Hollywood’s most private leading men, there are only a few things the world knows about Andy Garcia. For one, he is immensely proud of his Cuban heritage, but has tried to shed the label of “Latino” from being tacked in front of “Actor Andy Garcia.”
It was in that spirit that Garcia, best known for his roles as glamorous Don Juans in such movies as the Ocean’s Eleven movies or The Man from Elysian Fields, shed his usual digs and set out for a new kind of role to tell a different kind of story in his latest film. After all, no one thinks working class Italian-American prison guard when they think of Andy Garcia.
“I was once a man with a dream and this character is a man with a dream, a man filled with insecurities,” Garcia says. “I felt all those things are very beautiful. I felt that there are things that were close to me. The important thing is that the character came off the page to me and I was taken by him. There was something about him that hit me; it awakened something in my subconscious. I don’t quite understand why, but as an actor, I wanted to explore him and live the character. I wanted to open those doors.”
Shot in the Bronx and set in New York’s only fishing village, City Island tells the story of a dysfunctional, if lovable, working class family. Living in an idyllic house, each member of this clan—made up of a mother, father, daughter and son—leads something of a double life. Garcia is patriarch Vince Rizzo, a corrections officer who clandestinely longs to be in movies like his idol Marlon Brando, and who sneaks out to acting classes once a week under the guise of attending a poker game. When his teacher, played by Alan Arkin, challenges the students to act out their biggest secret, Vince must come to terms with a life, and a son, he left behind.
Winner of the Audience Award at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, City Island is a passion project brought together by Garcia and director, Raymond De Felitta. With an offbeat sense of humor, it examines the different layers through which family members connect.
“I was very moved by the screenplay and I was taken by all the characters in the story,” Garcia says. “I loved the concept of Vinnie Rizzo. I felt like I identified with him. He had that private dream that I once shared. He wanted to be an actor and I shared that dream with him. People looked at me like I was crazy for a number of years.”
With redemption in mind, Vince strikes out for an acting class in the Big Apple and seeks to build a relationship his son in the process. Played by Steven Strait, Rizzo’s bad boy son Tony befriends Vince’s wife, Joyce, played by Julianna Margulies. Joyce is dealing with the malaise of middle age and hiding her own secret vice from the family. Daughter Vivian, played by Garcia’s real-life daughter, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, is a college student funding her education through her secret enterprise: stripping.
“I found something really rare about this character,” Garcia-Lorido says. “The script was something wonderful, and every single role was so complete. [Vivian] made this sacrifice, but she never wanted her parents to pay the price. She carries herself as the only adult character in the movie and I found that to be special. I also really related to her in the respect that she cares about what her parents think. I do, too.”
Garcia-Lorido says she loved working with her dad, but noted that the fact she played a stripper took a toll on her when he was in the room. The 26-year-old actress banned her dad from the Staten Island strip club when she was shooting there.
And though the father-daughter duo had to film a scene in which Garcia’s character stares at his daughter’s new breast implants, Dominik insists it “wasn’t weird.” She adds, “It was great because there’s a real dynamic there. That really is my dad.
“It’s a great collaboration to work with my father,” she says of sharing the screen with Garcia, which she also did in Garcia’s opus The Lost City and La Linea. “It’s a true gift and a beautiful experience that we share this passion, but I do feel that it’s important to do my thing separately. ... I enjoy doing things on my own, and I like that fact that I am my own actress.”

Screen Shots

Whether in theaters, on TV or arriving in your mailbox on DVD, these gems burst through any screen, big or small.

Faces of America
Who are you and where do you come from? Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. asks those questions of many famous faces, encouraging audiences to ponder their own background. Interviewing Eva Longoria, Meryl Streep, Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali and others, he uses the latest tools of genealogy and genetics to delve deep into each person’s past and uncover some surprising ancestors. Longoria’s ancestors, for instance, arrived in the New World 17 years before the Mayflower. The goal is to spark a discussion on how diverse, yet interconnected, Americans are. PBS series, February 10 through March 3.

Cop Out
An unlikely law enforcement duo played by Bruce Willis and Tracey Morgan battle gangsters, track down a stolen baseball collector card and rescue Ana de la Reguera from the trunk of a car in this Kevin Smith-directed comedy.
In theaters.

P-Star Rising
This documentary follows a young girl’s journey from a Harlem shelter to teen rap artist. Her rise is fueled by her single father, Jesse Diaz, who is haunted by his own failed aspirations as they navigate the peaks and pitfalls of the music business and family relationships. PBS, February 9 through11.

From Mexico with Love
With dreams of being a prize fighter, undocumented migrant worker Hector Villa (Kuno Becker) toils under the Texas sun by day and scraps in town bars by night. Out on DVD.

Our Family Wedding
In the spirit of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, two very different families come together thanks to a young couple. Lucia (America Ferrera) plans her wedding to Marcus (Lance Gross) much to the dismay of their dueling dads In theaters.

Máncora
When his formerly indulgent life in Lima takes a tragic turn, Santiago (Jason Day) sets out to escape for Máncora, an idyllic beach in Peru. His beautiful step-sister Ximena (Elsa Pataky) and her brooding husband Iñigo (Enrique Murciano) join the excursion. Once there, paradise is quickly lost when shocking and reckless romance blooms and tension reaches its apex. Out on DVD.

confronting a painful past from behind a camera

By kiki bochi

Monika Navarro knew her Uncle Gino died a miserable death in Tijuana after being deported from the United States. But she was not quite ready for the harsh reality as she sought to tell his story—and her family’s—in a documentary.
“I wasn’t prepared to see the pauper’s grave in a ditch, marked by rusty iron stakes,” she says, describing one of the experiences that most resonated with her in making Lost Souls, part of PBS’s Independent Lens series.
With brave and brutal honesty, Navarro, 31, turns the camera on her own clan as she explores a family history that embodies the best and worst of the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Navarro, who was raised in Southern California and graduated from Tufts University in Boston, was 21 when she began probing the painful past about her uncles Gino and Augie. As she explored the family’s secrets, she edited them into a film that reflects the frailties of every American family.
Navarro’s uncles Gino and Augie were both were legal U.S. residents, both military veterans, and both drug addicts who were deported. Two months after being expelled, Gino died and was buried in an unmarked grave. Augie survives and continues to nurse his drug habit south of the border.
“My Uncle Gino’s deportation and death raised a number of questions in my mind about immigration, family, loss, and the existence of an ‘American Dream,’” Navarro explains in a statement about the film. Her camera in tow, she began asking those hard questions of her family, capturing answers of startling depth and weaving them with family photographs, letters and verité footage. While intensely intimate, Navarro’s film ultimately explores larger questions of national identity, immigration and U.S. border tensions as her family confronts its past.
Lost Souls is Navarro’s first documentary. To complete the project, she received several grants, including funding from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.
“I made the film to open up a dialogue about immigration and families that are affected by addiction,” says Navarro, a first-generation Mexican American. “I had an obligation to my family, and mostly to myself, to see this project through and get it out to the world.”
PBS premiere March 23; DVD available for pre-order.

Spotlight: Martha Higareda

Mexican Actress Martha Higareda will burn up your TV screen in Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball, released on DVD in mid-January. The film, much like the first Smokin’ Aces film, follows a group of freelance murderers competing to kill a target. Higareda plays Ariella Martinez, an assassin who seduces men and then kills them.
“The character called my attention a lot; I thought how fun it would be to play her,” Higareda says. But, landing the role took some lobbying. “It was initially written for an American actress,” she says. “I told my agent I didn’t care; I wanted to try out.” So she met with the director, made a “hit” impression and scored the role, even managing to get the character’s name changed for a Hispanic actress.
Asked if she bears any similarity to Ariella in real life, Higareda responds jokingly, “I have yet to seduce anyone and kill them, so in that aspect, no.” But she adds, “I had a lot of fun doing the movie. It’s my first action movie, and I have an adventurer spirit, so I was able to apply that to the part.” Among her adventures: learning to run in nearly six-inch heels while firing two guns at the same time.
Smokin’ Aces is Higareda’s third American film. You may have seen her also in Borderland (2007) and Street Kings (2008), where she played Grace Garcia and shared the screen with actors Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker. Higareda, who owns a production company in Mexico, is also working on the company’s first flick, Presento a Laura, in which she will star. It’s slated for release next year.
—Millie Acebal Rousseau