Occupying Salt Lake: A Decade of Latinx Creators Taking Up Space at Sundance
Sundance Film Festival celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. To commemorate the occasion, it displayed photos from previous years’ events before screenings. It was fun seeing snapshots of stars through the decades as they made their appearances in Park City, Utah. And although the modern festival clearly has an eye for diversity, it’s not hard to see echoes of previous, lilly-white iterations.
Today, Sundance entices a decidedly mixed crowd. In my two years of attending, I’ve heard plenty of Spanish on Main Street and networked with folks of all backgrounds. And it’s not just a more diverse audience at the festival, it’s also an increase in representation on screen—there are Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous films winning awards (and going on to get nominated for Oscars—looking at you, Past Lives).
And that matters—Sundance has become a Hollywood institution, a stamp of quality for the filmmakers who get selected, yes, but also a place of deal-making, where creatives meet and cook up the next big thing. Those stories go on to influence our culture, and our understanding of ourselves, and others—for better or for worse.
So how did we get to this place where marginalized communities, in general, and Latinx folks, in particular, are making such strong inroads in one of Hollywood’s most storied institutions? To find out, I talked with some of the Latina leaders who have made it their mission to get our community to Sundance through the years.
Filmmaker and founder of the Latino Filmmakers Network Maylen Calienes still remembers her first Sundance over a decade ago. In a backroom during her Latino Filmmakers Network 10th-Year Anniversary Reception at the festival, she tells me how two white guys initially invited her, “They're the ones that introduced me to Sundance, which was awesome. Because it's like, you kind of have to give someone an introduction. I knew about Sundance because some of the filmmakers that I admired, like Robert Rodriguez had [El] Mariachi that played here. So I would hear stories like that, and you hear ‘Sundance,’ but you really don't know until [you go]. You have to have that person that’s like, ‘Let’s go!’
“The first years that I started coming, it was the same crowd all the time. It was very Anglo; it was very white. And movies were all mostly [white]. Why do you have world cinema?” Calienes asks, remembering earlier European-heavy slates.
But Calienes saw something in the festival then, an opportunity to make change. “Before I even started Latino Filmmakers Network, I started bringing people. I started bringing other people from my community. I started bringing people from other communities, the Black community… and introducing them to Sundance,” she recalls. Calienes defines the Latino Filmmakers Network as a nonprofit that “works to bring visibility, opportunities, education, [and] unity to the diverse group of people that we have in our own Latino community.” At the reception I attended, it was clear that it’s working.
There were folks, mostly Latinx but not entirely, at all stages in their careers, veterans and newcomers all coming together in community. There was a range of careers, too-–from film directors to festival organizers to nonprofit leaders, and at least one insurance agent. What Calienes does now, in addition to organizing events at the festival (including one this year opened by John Leguizamo), is invite a handful of Latinx filmmakers to join her at Sundance each year. She introduces them to the festival by providing lodging and networking opportunities—and the strategy has borne fruit.
Anyelo Lopez in La Sombra del Sol (The Shadow of the Sun), a film by Miguel Ángel Ferrer. Still courtesy of Magic Films
She recounts producing The Shadow of the Sun with one of her previous invitees, which went on to premiere at the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival and become Venezuela’s official nomination for the Academy Awards this year. “For me, success is just seeing that people are actually making the work happen, and awesome work, quality work,” she declares. That’s increasingly possible thanks to the Latino Filmmakers Network and its 10 years of advocacy.
Calienes points to 2020 as the year the festival started to change, the same year when Olga Segura and Mónica Ramírez opened the Latinx House at the festival. They were patterning their work off the Blackhouse that started in 2007 and where Calienes remembers hanging out in those early years. “I felt like I belonged even though I'm not Black,” she recounts.
As official partners with Sundance, these houses invite underrepresented groups to attend the elite festival, effectively showing that yes, people of color are welcome. They serve as pop-up meeting spaces for panels, parties, and more. The Blackhouse came first, serving as a welcoming space for not just the Black community but underrepresented groups at large. Since then and following their model, other groups working with the Latinx, Indigenous, AAPI, and LGBTQ communities have cropped up, expanding from a Black-and-white frame to a much more nuanced one.
Now celebrating its fifth anniversary, the Latinx House cofounder Ramírez looks back on the changes she’s seen. Speaking with me on a Zoom post-festival, she shares, “There's been growth all around the number of people from our community who are attending and people [who] know about the festival”—and that includes the work and creators featured at the festival. She notes how in 2020, she counted 12 films featuring Latinx talent “and that was a record year.” In 2024, she saw 20. That meaningful growth speaks to how the Latinx community has purposefully started taking up space at the festival.
Part of the secret sauce is certainly the Latinx House, which Ramírez describes as “a space that we have created for people, for the Latinx/Latine community to gather, to celebrate, to talk about issues that we care about, to dream. I always say ‘to dream,’ because it's important that we have space to dream. But it's not only for Latino people; it's also for our allies.”
Looking back, Ramírez remembers, “It just feels different than it did before. Like you can see BIPOC people walking on the streets and [there] are the places that we've set up whether it be Latinx House or Gold House and Sunrise Collective. These spaces—they say there's just a different kind of welcoming that didn't exist before.”
Now, Ramírez is proud to report, “I often think of the Latinx House as an incubation space.” It’s where creators, whether they have a film in the festival or not, can gather and start figuring out how to make their next project together.
“In 2016, 2017, 2018, at that time, all the conversation was about the need for representation, the need for inclusion, etc. And I think for me, the biggest shift is now people are just doing it on their own. They're not waiting for people to give them an opportunity.”
Lynette Coll, according to Ramírez, is an example of a person doing just that. Along with Sergio Lira and Cristobal Güell, Coll is one of the cofounders of Luz Films, a new production company that launched at this year’s Sundance. They’re “a collective of artists [who have come together] to produce each other's things and to use our resources to push our stories forward,” Coll tells me in the Latinx House’s bathroom, the only warm and somewhat quiet space we could find during the bustling and snow-filled festival. “Luz is a home for Latinx talent. It's a home for artists. We're here to support.”
At the festival, Luz premiered its first film, In the Summers. “We're taking the risks—calculated risks—that everybody else is not taking,” Coll says of funding first-time director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio. Their film follows two sisters who spend their summers visiting their father in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Played impressively by René Pérez Joglar (Residente), the dad is struggling with addiction and sometimes he’s reckless with his daughters while other times he’s tender with them.
It’s a universal story about family dynamics with Latinx texture-–the characters don’t struggle with their Puerto Rican identities but rather inhabit them. They’re working to grow up, navigate their relationships, and figure out how to love themselves in a world that isn’t always so nurturing. As such, the film won big at Sundance, earning the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the Directing Award: U.S. Dramatic for Lacorazza.
“Alessandra is an incredible visionary. The story is so well written; the characters are multi-dimensional. You've never seen Latinos have the opportunity to create characters such as this one. What you'll see in it, [the father] has a lot of textures, gravitas, and everything is intentional and super detailed,” says Coll, who produced the film. Latinxs “have a pipeline, and we have a lot of projects. But for us [at Luz], we don't want to stay in the development process—we want to produce. The whole point of this company is to make things.
In fact, the activists I spoke to on and off record are all ready to move past the representation conversation and do something. Coll notes, “We all get invited to diversity and inclusion events—and then nothing happens.” Likewise, Ramírez is ready to move on, saying the lack of representation is, “obviously a problem. It needs to be fixed. But that cannot be the only topic that we talk about.”
“We all get invited to diversity and inclusion events—and then nothing happens.”
For example, Ramírez is ready to call out the “gaslighting” of a Hollywood system that would blame underrepresented groups for our plight. “When something fails, they always blame it on us. They blame it on our community. And I'm like, ‘How can you blame it on our community, when our community A. shows up all the time, B. doesn't have access to some of the content because of lack of broadband and other issues, and C. you're not investing the kind of resources in our projects as you are other projects?” she asks. “I think what has changed, and it’s important, is we're not buying that anymore. We finally recognize that that's gaslighting.”
And with that recognition, we as a community can focus on systemic change in Hollywood and making our own stuff. Calienes does that as a filmmaker and an organizer of the Latino Filmmakers Network. Ramírez is doing it with her work hosting the Latinx House at Sundance and other high-profile spaces, making sure Latinx perspectives are part of the conversation where power lives. And Coll is doing it with Luz, bringing together like-minded creatives like Charlie Chaplin did with United Artists all those years ago.
Their work, this movement to tell authentic Latinx stories at the highest levels, matters. It’s here where we are “changing the negative impressions or stereotypes that people have of our community, that have caused a lot of harm, whether it be physical harm, or discrimination against community members, or overall misperceptions about our community that are holding us back,” Ramírez explains artfully. “That is real. Those perceptions are real. And they've had very negative consequences for us. And I think that the movies that are being made, and the movies that are being screened [at Sundance], they are an avenue for being able to facilitate change.”
It’s a powerful vision and one that rings clearly across the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. In the Summers took top honors and it wasn’t the only Latinx film to garner big attention. FRIDA: In Her Own Words documentary director Carla Gutiérrez won the Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award: U.S. Documentary. And Mexican filmmakers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez won their Sundance category, World Cinema Dramatic, with Sujo. That film follows a young boy whose father works in the drug trade and dies as part of it, leaving his son to figure out how to become a man without him.
“The movies that are being made, and the movies that are being screened [at Sundance], they are an avenue for being able to facilitate change.”
And it’s not just the Sundance award winners. There were so many Latinx titles at this year’s festival, spanning the categories and representing different countries, races, sexualities, and pain points. In addition to In the Summers, Ramírez proudly supported Igualada this year. The documentary follows Francia Marquez in her historic run for the presidency of Colombia, eventually becoming vice president.
Igualada follows Francia Marquez in her historic run for the presidency of Colombia. Photo by Darwin Torres
“The vice president was a domestic worker who was organizing on the ground, and [who] gave us visibility to Afro Colombians,” Ramírez says. “So that movie, it has the ability to change people's impression about who are domestic workers and what is their role in the world and what is possible. It flips this narrative around who is powerful… And by changing the way that we're thinking about the world, then there's a possibility for something better to come.”
Certainly, more and more Latinx leaders have come to invest in organizing our community for better representation in media. At the Latino Filmmakers Network Reception and the Latinx House, I saw and spoke with representatives from the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP), and the Latino Film Institute (LFI), three heavyweights in the space. Earlier this year, 27 Latino/Hispanic groups came together to advocate for the first live-action Latinx-starring superhero movie Blue Beetle when its cast couldn’t promote it because of the strike.
And this unity and focus, it’s a change, too. “This year, I'm super happy, too, because now I'm seeing all the leaders from the different Latino nonprofits here [in] the same year. Usually, I would see them here and there every [few years],” Calienes shares. “Our community should come together. The leaders of all these nonprofit organizations, especially [those that] cater to our community, should come together and make a big splash because, again, together, we win.”
We are close to realizing Calienes’ vision. “We are all rooting for each other,” Ramírez shares. She sees how each group has its own approach and those approaches are “not better or worse” than each other—they’re just different. Ramírez posits that if we’re going to solve the “lack of representation, misconceptions, stereotypes, violence, etc., [we’ve] got to be able to look at it from lots of different angles.”
The success of that multifaceted approach is evident at Sundance, where Latinas and their organizations have been making progress over the last decade to turn this influential festival into an event that uses its power for good, advancing representation for all. There’s still more to do but that doesn’t mean that success so far isn’t notable. Let their work be a blueprint for changing the rest of Hollywood and from there, the world.
A writer, speaker, and critic, Cristina Escobar works at the intersection of race, gender, and pop culture. She’s the co-founder and EIC of LatinaMedia.Co, an indie publication platforming Latina and queer Latinx perspectives in media. In addition, she has an accomplished freelance career with bylines in the A.V. Club, Glamour, NPR, Refinery29, Remezcla, TODAY, Vulture, and more. A TEDx speaker, Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and member of the Critics Choice Association and the Latino Entertainment Journalists Association, she lives in Santa Fe with her husband, two kids, and rescue dog.