Entertainment
Are we living in the golden age of Tejano documentary filmmaking?
A spate of documentaries focusing on the lives of Tejanos have found platforms over the last six months, showcasing how diverse, nuanced and entertaining our lives can be.
You can find the contemplative radicals of “Hummingbirds” trolling the streets of Laredo over on PBS; the determined detectives of “The Chicano Squad” solving crimes in Houston on A&E; and a dozen or so student musicians competing in “Going Varsity in Mariachi” on Netflix. On Max, the third episode of the Texas docuseries triptych “God Save Texas” takes an intimate and personal look at border life in El Paso, while Tubi has become the new home for “As I Walk Through the Valley,” an in-depth look at the history of rock ‘n’ roll in the Rio Grande Valley.
And that’s just what you can stream right now. “The In Between,” a doc about grief and reconnection set in the small border town of Eagle Pass, is currently making its way through the festival circuit and is set to air on PBS next spring. Even Texas Monthly is executive producing a documentary about iconic Tejano television host Johnny Canales. (Disclosure: De Los editorial director Fidel Martinez is featured in this project.)
As a border native, I’ve become used to a specific kind of narrative when it comes to how my homeland is depicted on screen, so this new wave of Tejano filmmaking is not only remarkable, it’s long overdue. But how did we get here?
The mainstreaming of Latino culture within the U.S. over the past decade has certainly helped, making it easier for filmmakers to convince streamers there’s an audience for their films. Alejandra Vasquez, a proud Tejana and one of the directors of the Sundance-award-winning “Going Varsity in Mariachi,” admits that Bad Bunny and other superstars are helpful for the broader Latinx media consumption moment, but more specifically, she says, people are just tired of the same sad story about the border being told over and over again. You know the type (Disney’s National Geographic has been making shows like “Border Security: America’s Front Line” and “Border Wars” since 2010): dour tales about violence, the hazards of immigration, and the frustrating politics that follow.
“Those of us who grew up near the border and who are intimately familiar with the cross-cultural exchange that is so inherent of living on the border are like, ’Hey, that’s not the only story, that’s not the only side to this,” said Vasquez, adding that she and co-director Sam Osborn deliberately wanted to make an underdog sports movie where the balls and jerseys were swapped out for music and sombreros. “We wanted to have people on the edge of their seats.”
Mario Diaz, who directed “The Chicano Squad,” agrees that there’s a fatigue that has set in for audiences but says there’s also a desire to be entertained by the stories they’re consuming.
“Latin audiences want to have a good time,” Diaz says, noting that he worked hard to incorporate both the important cultural context of Mexican immigration in Houston with cool crime-solving swagger in “The Chicano Squad.”
Perhaps then the stale story of the border, the one of tragedy and turmoil, has created an ever-growing audience of filmgoers hungry for border stories that are both nuanced, and dare I say, fun?
“I just don’t think we’ve been given the opportunity to tell these stories before,” Diaz said. “Now, because of our own making, we’re pushing these stories out into the world.”
Diaz, who hails from Puerto Rico but who has taken a shine to Tejanos and our stories (his next project is also based in Texas), argues that this moment is more than just a trend, and that it is one of the community’s own making. Vazquez says a small group of like-minded Tejano artists have started a private network online to share resources and know-how and to connect experts to continue growing the field. “No one else is giving us that opportunity,” she says. “Once we get together, things happen. We’re like, OK, let’s do it, vamos!”
Charlie Vela lived the DIY filmmaking experience when he and co-director Ronnie Garza made 2017’s “As I Walk Through the Valley,” a head-banging sociological sojourn through the punk rock music history of the Rio Grande Valley. When the duo began filming in earnest back in 2015, neither had any professional experience with filmmaking. They did, however, have a deep understanding of their subject and a scrappy get-it-done-no-matter-what attitude.
“We did our film for no money,” said Vela. The goal, he added, was to tell the story and entertain his friends. “That’s how I’ve sort of approached anything creative I’ve ever done and it’s yielded surprising results.”
Vela was shocked when the film was accepted into that year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, where it premiered on his daughter’s first birthday to critical praise and national media attention. The movie never found a buyer, but through co-director Garza’s grit and determination, the film now has a home on Tubi, where millions can stream it for free.
“I’m just relieved it’s in a place where it’s accessible,” Vela says. “And folks don’t have to hit us up for a link anymore.”
Both Vela and Vasquez point to institutions like the Laredo Film Society and Entre, a Rio Grande Valley-based cooperative community film center, as important spaces where production teams can find local staffers for projects, filmmakers and artists can network and audiences can see different types of storytelling about the border. LFS has existed in some form since 2015, while Entre was founded in 2021.
“We’re helping to better define border stories and stories in this region,” says Entre co-founder Andres Sanchez. “A lot of folks tend to speak for the border and this community and use a lot of harmful rhetoric. We’re trying to do justice to this place we call home.”
Filmmaker and former LFS board member Karen Gaytán says these spaces play a critical role in sustaining and growing the movement, but that they are just a piece of the puzzle. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” she says, “but I think we’re seeing a very exciting genesis that I hope continues to grow.”
Everyone I talked to agreed that even with the success of this wave of filmmaking, there are still plenty of obstacles to overcome.
Vasquez says she and her “Going Varsity in Mariachi” team were lucky to find producers who came onboard early to support the production, but they struggled to sell or get distribution for the film. The documentary, she was told, was both too Mexican and not Mexican enough.
“We hear it over and over as Tejanos” she said. Eventually, they were able to secure a licensing deal with Netflix for 42 months, which Vasquez says has been a blessing.
Just making sure audiences know these stories are available is a challenge, says Diaz, whose A&E series is the rare exception: a network-backed story that got a full marketing push. More common, he says, are projects that are completed and then put out on a platform without so much as a whisper. “Even if productions are getting funded,” he says, “you’d never know about them. It puts the onus on the audience and the community.”
And so, even if we are in the golden age of Tejano documentary filmmaking, everything is not quite golden. This moment, however, does seem to have a name. Back in March, Carlos A. Gutiérrez, the executive director of Cinema Tropical, a New York-based nonprofit focused on highlighting Latin American cinema in the U.S., wrote about how multiple Tejano filmmakers were “defying hegemonic narratives,” dubbing this collective body of work as the “Border New Wave.” He says it can be traced as far back to 2014 when El Paso native Cristina Ibarra debuted “Las Marthas,” a film that follows Laredo’s high society set as they prepare for an annual debutante ball and pageant. The doc originally aired on PBS and is now available to stream on Kanopy. The marker signifies the beginning of a tidy decade of diverse Tejano films that are being seen by more people than ever.
“It adds up,” Vela says, creating more and more examples of success for executives to begin to understand the gradients of stories that make up the border. Not that Tejano filmmakers are making these films for executives anyway. “Even though the economics are complicated, I would hate for someone locally who wants to tell a story, but is discouraged because they think ‘Oh, I’ll never get it distributed,’” Vela says. “If you just want to make it, you can make it.”
It seems there’s no better time.
Luis G. Rendon is a Tejano journalist who lives in New York City and writes about South Texas food and culture. He’s been published in Texas Monthly, Texas Highways and the Daily Beast. You can find him on Twitter/X @louiegrendon and Instagram @lrendon.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: A real-life ’70s hostage drama crackles in Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’
It plays a little loose with facts but the righteous rage of “Dog Day Afternoon” is present enough in Gus Van Sant’s “Dead Man’s Wire,” a based-on-a-true-tale hostage thriller that’s as deeply 1970s as it is contemporary.
In February 1977, Tony Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage Company in downtown Indianapolis and took one of its executives, Dick Hall, hostage. Kiritsis held a sawed-off shotgun to the back of Hall’s head and draped a wire around his neck that connected to the gun. If he moved too much, he would die.
The subsequent standoff moved to Kiritsis’ apartment and eventually concluded in a live televised news conference. The whole ordeal received some renewed attention in a 2022 podcast dramatization starring Jon Hamm.
But in “Dead Man’s Wire,” starring Bill Skarsgård as Kiritsis, these events are vividly brought to life by Van Sant. It’s been seven years since Van Sant directed, following 2018’s “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” and one of the prevailing takeaways of his new film is that that’s too long of a break for a filmmaker of Van Sant’s caliber.
Working from a script by Austin Kolodney, the filmmaker of “My Own Private Idaho” and “Good Will Hunting” turns “Dead Man’s Wire” into not a period-piece time capsule but a bracingly relevant drama of outrage and inequality. Tony feels aggrieved by his mortgage company over a land deal the bank, he claims, blocked. We’re never given many specifics, but at the same time, there’s little doubt in “Dead Man’s Wire” that Tony’s cause is just. His means might be desperate and abhorrent, but the movie is very definitely on his side.
That’s owed significantly to Skarsgård, who gives one of his finest and least adorned performances. While best known for films like “It,” “The Crow” and “Nosferatu,” here Skarsgård has little more than some green polyester and a very ’70s mustache to alter his looks. The straightforward, jittery intensity of his performance propels “Dead Man’s Wire.”
Yet Van Sant’s film aspires to be a larger ensemble drama, which it only partially succeeds at. Tony’s plight is far from a solitary one, as numerous threads suggest in Kolodney’s fast-paced script. First and foremost is Colman Domingo as a local DJ named Fred Temple. (If ever there were an actor suited, with a smooth baritone, to play a ’70s radio DJ, it’s Domingo.) Tony, a fan, calls Fred to air his demands. But it’s not just a media outlet for him. Fred touts himself as “the voice of the people.”
Something similar could be said of Tony, who rapidly emerges as a kind of folk hero. As much as he tortures his hostage (a very good Dacre Montgomery), he’s kind to the police officers surrounding him. And as he and Dick spend more time together, Dick emerges as a kind of victim, himself. It’s his father’s bank, and when Tony gets M.L. Hall (Al Pacino) on the phone, he sounds painfully insensitive, sooner ready to sacrifice his son than acknowledge any wrongdoing.
Pacino’s presence in “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nod to “Dog Day Afternoon,” a movie that may be far better — but, then again, that’s true of most films in comparison to Sidney Lumet’s unsurpassed 1975 classic. Still, Van Sant’s film bears some of the same rage and disillusionment with the meatgrinder of capitalism as “Dog Day.”
There’s also a telling, if not entirely successful subplot of a local TV news reporter (Myha’la) struggling against stereotypes. Even when she gets the goods on the unspooling news story, the way her producer says to “chop it up” and put it on air makes it clear: Whatever Tony is rebelling against, it’s him, not his plight, that will be served up on a prime-time plate.
It doesn’t take recent similar cases of national fascination, such as Luigi Mangione, charged with killing a healthcare executive, to see contemporary echoes of Kiritsis’ tale. The real story is more complicated and less metaphor-ready, of course, than the movie, which detracts some from the film’s gritty sense of verisimilitude. Staying closer to the truth might have produced a more dynamic movie.
But “Dead Man’s Wire” still works. In the film, Tony’s demands are $5 million and an apology. It’s clear the latter means more to him than the money. The tragedy in “Dead Man’s Wire” is just how elusive “I’m sorry” can be.
“Dead Man’s Wire,” a Row K Entertainment release, is rated R for language throughout. Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.
In a bid for greater user engagement, Walt Disney Co. will introduce vertical videos to its Disney+ app over the next year, a company executive said Wednesday.
The move is part of the Burbank media and entertainment company’s effort to encourage more frequent app usage, particularly on smartphones.
“We know that mobile is an incredible opportunity to turn Disney+ into a true daily destination for fans,” Erin Teague, executive vice president of product management, said during an onstage presentation in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show. “All of the short-form Disney content you want, all in one unified app.”
Teague said the company will evolve that capability over time to determine new formats, categories and content types.
Disney’s presentation also touched on its interest in artificial intelligence. Last month, San Francisco startup OpenAI said it had reached a licensing deal with Disney to use more than 200 of the company’s popular characters in its text-to-video tool, Sora. Under the terms of that deal, users will be able to write prompts that generate short videos featuring Disney characters and use ChatGPT images to create those characters’ visages. Some of those Sora-generated videos will be shown on Disney+, though the companies said the deal did not include talent likenesses or voices.
Disney also said it would invest $1 billion into the AI company.
Part of Disney’s move toward AI is to appeal to young Gen Alpha viewers, who are more comfortable with AI and “expect to interact with entertainment” instead of simply watching stories on the screen, Teague said.
“AI is an accelerator,” she said. “It’s why collaborations with partners like OpenAI are absolutely crucial. We want to empower a new generation of fandom that is more interactive and immersive, while also respecting human creativity and protecting user safety.”
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Is This Thing On?
Cinematic stories of disintegrating marriages are fairly commonplace—and often depressing emotional endurance tests, besides—so it’s interesting to see co-writer/director Bradley Cooper take this variation on the theme in a fresher direction. The unhappy couple in this place is Alex and Tess Novak (Will Arnett and Laura Dern), who decide matter-of-factly to separate. Then Alex impulsively decides to get up on stage at an open-mic comedy night, and starts turning their relationship issues into material. The premise would seem to suggest an uneven balance towards Alex’s perspective, but the script is just as interested in Tess—a former Olympic-level volleyball player who retired to focus on motherhood—searching for her own purpose. And the narrative takes a provocative twist when their individual sparks of renewed happiness lead them towards something resembling an affair with their own spouse. The screenplay faces a challenge common to movies about comedians in that Alex’s material, even once he’s supposed to be actively working on it, isn’t particularly good, and Cooper isn’t particularly restrained in his own supporting performance as the comic-relief buddy character (who is called “Balls,” if that provides any hints). Yet the two lead performances are terrific—particularly Dern, who nails complex facial expressions upon her first encounter with Alex’s act—as Cooper and company turn this narrative into an exploration of how it can seem that you’ve fallen out of love with your partner, when what you’ve really fallen out of love with is the rest of your life. Available Jan. 9 in theaters. (R)
JANUARY SPECIAL SCREENINGS
KRCL’s Music Meets Movies: Dig! XX @ Brewvies: As part of a farewell to Sundance, Brewvies/KRCL’s regular Music Meets Movies series presents the extended 20th anniversary edition of the 2004 Sundance documentary about the rivalry between the Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre as they chart different music-biz paths. The screening takes place at Brewvies (677 S. 200 West) on Jan. 8 @ 7:30 p.m., $10 at the door or 2-for-1 with KRCL shirt. brewvies.com
Trent Harris weekend @ SLFS: Utah’s own Trent Harris has charted a singular course as an independent filmmaker, and you can catch two of his most (in)famous works at Salt Lake Film Society. In 1991’s Rubin & Ed, two mismatched souls—one an eccentric, isolated young man (Crispin Glover), the other a middle-aged financial scammer—wind up on a comedic road trip through the Utah desert; 1995’s Plan 10 from Outer Space turns Mormon theology into a crazy science-fiction parody. Get a double dose of uncut Trent Harris weirdness on Friday, Jan. 9, with Rubin & Ed at 7 p.m. and Plan 10 from Outer Space at 9 p.m. Tickets are $13.75 for each screening. slfs.org
Rob Reiner retrospective @ Brewvies Sunday Brunch: Last month’s tragic passing of actor/director Rob Reiner reminded people of his extraordinary work, particularly his first handful of features. Brewvies’ regular “Sunday Brunch” series showcases three of these films this month with This Is Spinal Tap (Jan. 11), The Princess Bride (Jan. 18) and Stand By Me (Jan. 25). All screenings are free with no reservations, on a first-come first-served basis, at noon each day. brewvies.com
David Lynch retrospective @ SLFS: It’s been a year since the passing of groundbreaking artist David Lynch, and Salt Lake Film Society’s Broadway Centre Cinemas marks the occasion with some of his greatest filmed work. In addition to theatrical features Eraserhead (Jan. 11), Inland Empire (Jan. 11), Mulholland Dr. (Jan. 12), Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (Jan. 14), Blue Velvet (Jan. 19) and Lost Highway (Jan. 19), you can experience the entirety of 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return on the big screen in two-episode blocs Jan. 16 – 18. The programming also includes the 2016 documentary David Lynch: The Art Life. slfs.org
Death by Numbers @ Utah Film Center: Directed by Kim A. Snyder (the 2025 Sundance feature documentary The Librarians), this 2024 Oscar-nominated documentary short focuses on Sam Fuentes, survivor of a school shooting who attempts to process her experience through poetry. This special screening features a live Q&A with Terri Gilfillan and Nancy Farrar-Halden of Gun Violence Prevention Center of Utah, with Zoom participation by Sam Fuentes. The screening on Wednesday, Jan. 14 at 7 p.m. at Utah Film Center (375 W. 400 North) is free with registration at the website.
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