Americans for Immigrant Justice – Miami Film Festival & Tower Theater Miami
Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival and Tower Theater Miami have always strived to lend a voice to immigrant stories. In Miami, this subject ties directly to our population and what most of the community faces daily. These stories talk about the struggle of leaving one’s home, family, and loved ones and coming to a new country where you do not know the language – where customs and traditions differ from what you’ve been raised to know. Some of these people come with families and face multigenerational struggles in restarting their lives from zero – the stories from around the globe are endless. Miami Film Festival and Tower Theater Miami recognize the importance of immigrants in a community and the hardships they face. This is why we want to take this moment to highlight and partner with a national organization with its roots in Miami that takes on this mission every day.
Americans for Immigrant Justice is an award-winning nonprofit organization that has protected the immigrant community in the United States for over 25 years. They champion immigrant rights and provide free legal representation for those without the means to afford an immigration attorney.
In celebration of their 25-year anniversary, and as a way to honor the work they have done over the years, we have chosen a specially curated selection of past Festival films that highlight these stories which you can stream at home.
To commemorate this milestone, we will also be hosting a screening of Maria Corina Ramirez’s BRIDGES on January 27, 2022 at MDC’s Tower Theater Miami in the heart of Little Havana. Maria Corina Ramirez is a local filmmaker, DREAMer, and her latest film BRIDGES is a semiautobiographical film about her journey as a Venezuelan living in Miami. BRIDGES had its World Premiere at the 38th Miami Film Festival earlier this year. We invite you to join us for this very special screening!
To learn more about Americans for Immigrant Justice, visit their website: https://aijustice.org/
WATCH AT HOME
THE INFILTRATORS: Miami Film Festival 2019 Official Selection
A look into the horrid reality of an Obama-era immigration detention system, The Infiltrators is a based-on-true-events hybrid documentary-fiction film, providing important and powerful commentary on the awful conditions immigrants face while unfairly detained and holding no power over their future.
LOS LOBOS: Miami Film Festival 2020 Official Selection
When director Samuel Kishi Leopo was five years old, his mother convinced him and his younger brother to journey from Mexico to Albuquerque with the promise that she’d soon take them to Disneyland. She was of course really starting them on a perilous journey of migration, with the hope of a better life, and that journey and promise form the emotional heart of Los Lobos.
JUANITA: Miami Film Festival 2019 Official Selection
A poignant dramedy on immigration, love and survival, director Leticia Tonos rewards us with a beautifully modulated combination of pathos and laughter. Juanita (Cheddy García) is a Dominican immigrant who has been living illegally in Madrid for some years, there she meets Mariano a lonely Spanish farmer. Juanita pressures Mariano to bring her home for a long overdue trip to Santo Domingo for Christmas. Not only is Mariano visiting a country and culture that is new to him, he is about to experience the adventure of having Dominican in-laws.
FIREFLIES: Miami Film Festival 2019 Official Selection
Fireflies is a powerful film about the harrowing consequences of exile and being perpetually cast in the role of otherness. Ramin is a young Iranian man living and working illegally in the port city of Veracruz, Mexico. He longs to travel to Turkey to be closer to his native land and his secret boyfriend, but circumstances make it all but impossible.
ROADS IN FEBRUARY: Miami Film Festival 2019 Official Selection
Sarah, a young woman raised in Canada by her Uruguayan immigrant parents, leaves the cold Montreal winter to seek out her roots, after her father’s untimely death. In Uruguay, a country she has never been to, the mysteries of her parents’ past becomes a riddle that Sarah must solve as she comes to terms with the deep differences between the village of her childhood fantasies and the reality of a place that seems cemented in a past that no longer exists.
AUGUST: Miami Film Festival GEMS 2020 Official Selection
In the midst of Cuba’s período especial, one of the greatest crises in the country’s history, thousands of Cuban rafters try to reach the United States illegally, never sure if they’ll make it out alive. While Carlos is enjoying his carefree summer break, little does he know about the country’s uncertain future, until one by one, neighbors and friends leave in search of a better life, friendships break apart and families split up.
JOIN US FOR AN IN-PERSON SCREENING
BRIDGES: Miami Film Festival 2021 Official Selection
In-person screening, January 27, 2022
Followed by a Q&A with Director, Maria Corina Ramirez
Tower Theater Miami, 1508 SW 8th St, Miami FL 33132
Maria Cecilia, a high school valedictorian originally from Venezuela but growing up in Miami, grapples with her fate and her identity as graduation day approaches. Meanwhile, her mother, Violeta, veers too close to a ghost from the past. And Gaby, her younger sister, swears she’s found the answer to it all: winning the lottery
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