Inaugural film festival Color Vérité in Jackson bills 11 short films as a celebration of adventure movie making from people of color. KHOL film critic Jeff Counts spoke with the festival’s creator, Jr Rodriguez, about how being relegated into special categories inspired the new project. The festival is on Aug. 26 at the Center for the Arts in Jackson starting at 5 p.m. with selected shorts starting at 7 p.m. and ending with an after-hours dance party.
Jeff Counts: So what is the origin story of Color Vérité, this brand new film festival?
Junior Rodriquez: This idea came about because I was touring a film that I helped direct and it was about myself. It’s called “Waiting for Change.” And the film is about me kind of not thriving in Jackson Hole and fishing being the connector to those tender family memories that had to do with water. And so this film meant a lot to me. And it got into some pretty big festivals, but it always was put in like a special block. Whether it was the people of color block or the like social change block. And we were always relegated to a smaller venue and we were relegated to a bad day. And a lot of the other people in my block were feeling the same way. ‘Why aren’t our stories valuable enough to be in the big theater?’ So that kind of got me thinking. These festivals aren’t run by people of color, they’re not run by people like us. So I started chatting with people at every film festival that we got into. And I was talking to the director and founder in Houston, the Houston Latino Film Festival. So that kind of started the big wheels turning.
JC: I’m sure you got a lot of submissions for such a wonderful and necessary event. So, aside from representation, what was the panel looking for?
JR: The panel was looking for films that are a little more complex, are more character-driven. We weren’t looking for the: conquer the big mountain, let’s put some barriers in our lives because we’ve lived a privileged life. We’re looking for transformation, we’re looking for process, we’re looking for healing.
JC: I think there’s a lot of you coded into the DNA of this festival. And your bio says that you intend to “rewrite the value system in our connection to nature.” What do you mean by this, Junior? And how can film get us closer to that ideal?
JR: Creating a new value system. We have a film that talks about that. It’s not in this festival, but it’s called the Internal Peaks. It’s about skiing here in Jackson Hole. And the whole film is a critique on what skiing values. We do this first descent, which is incredibly valuable in skiing, right? You say that and people start to perk up. And that first ski descent was in Columbia and the whole film, we mostly talk about the process because we had a lot of backlash from the Latino community. And that mattered more, to do right by our people, because that was the whole reason we wanted to complete the first descent in the beginning is to make our people proud. The definition of nature or the outdoors just needs to expand a little more to include more people. And there’s a lot of people that have been excluded for a long time.
JC: So many of the subjects in your film “Across Together” talk about how their parents don’t understand their fascination with hiking because as immigrant adults they’re always working. There’s no time for hikes. In the same vein, it must be daunting for some people to see themselves behind the camera in cinema. So what is your advice to first-time filmmakers of color who doubt they will be taken seriously in an industry not known for nurturing voices like theirs.
JR: Tough question, Jeff. I think you gotta start where you’re at, you gotta start with your community. And it doesn’t mean sell out your community, I think those are the types of films that we don’t want. We want you to uplift your community. Our stories matter in a way that our abuelitas and abuelitos and our ancestors know because they’ve passed down stories to us. So in the same vein, you can tell stories and now we have the beautiful mechanisms of visual media. Just start where you’re at.
JC: So you’re in year one, if this festival sticks, what are your plans for year two, year five and beyond?
JR: I think even in year one, our plan is to tour this set of films. There’s a lot of need, a lot of want really, we know a lot of other filmmakers of color and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, will you bring this to New York? Will you bring this to Chicago? Will you bring this to LA?’ So there’s a whole lot of interest for something like this. It doesn’t mean that I need to run it forever because that’s not how you keep creativity going. At some point, even I will probably have blind spots, right, where some new method of filmmaking would be like, ‘Whoa, that’s too experimental. Let’s keep it to A and B,’ which is what happens currently in some of the other festivals of adventure.
