The Talon – UBC’s alternative student press – is back from our summer hiatus! This year brings in a fresh start, with new ideas, exciting content, and a set of amazing incoming editors! We will be publishing again in a couple of days.
We’re proud to kick the year off by announcing our media partnership with Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. If you haven’t heard of or been to the Fest before, now’s your chance!
The annual festival is a non-profit organization that aims to create a forum to share Latin American cinema with a Vancouver audience, and in particular to provide space for independent filmmakers to showcase their work. This year will feature a number of new directors from Mexico, guest country of honour. The Festival is kicking off Thursday, September 3rd, and will close on Sunday, September 13th.
The Festival will be taking place on the occupied, unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, specifically the sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh), and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) nations. We hope this Festival provides our audience an opportunity to engage and act in solidarity with the crucial work of decolonial resistance, including Indigenous resurgence on these lands and abroad, which often begins – but by no means ends – with media, education, and art.
Some heartrending and critical films in the line-up include El Patron, Anatomy Of A Crime (Argentina, 2014), a film based on real events that occurred in the Buenos Aires meat industry; Daughter of the Lake (Peru/Bolivia, 2015), a documentary following the story of Nélida, a young Indigenous Andean woman, in her conviction to protect the waters in her community from gold extraction; and NN (Perú, 2014), a story exploring Peru’s Non Nomine – the disappeared whose bodies have finally been found.
Be sure to check out the fourth edition of Indigenous Film from BC & Beyond, “Ecologies of Healing and Knowing,” a showcase of short films curated by imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and Sonia Medel.
We are also going to be doing a review of a film showing on the closing night: La Prenda (The Pawn), a documentary about violence against women in Guatemala and the intersecting violence of US border patrol. Stay tuned!
The rest of the festival and more information about tickets, venues, and special guests can be found on the VLAFF website.
We can’t wait to see you at the Festival, and are excited to bring you more critical Talon content (hint: new editors! political cartoons! creative content! welcome back parties!).
Hope you had a restful summer.
In solidarity,
The Talon Editorial Collective 2015-2016
