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My film is part documentary, part narrative. the narrative bit is based on a short story written by Raquel Gutierrez, which takes place in the early 80s. The main character is a 15 year-old boy named Teódulo Mejía, whose father is a leader in the FMLN (Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí). He arrives to MacArthur Park in 1985 amongst the waves of political immigrants seeking asylum from Latin America. The US intervention in El Salvador was at its time the largest counter-insurgency war against left-wing guerrillas since Vietnam. So there is a deep irony that many of these refugees ended up here in southern California, in the crux of a totally other set of oppressions. This history is so embedded in LA and the Silver Platter. Raquel's story folds together ideological/sexual revolutions and I'm so excited to turn it into film using lo-fi cinema magic-tricks... thinking of Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames IN GENERAL.

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Maria's Story directed by Manona Wali and Pamela Cohen