Professor at UO up for Latin Golden Globes award
EUGENE, Ore. - A UO Professor is in the run for a highly acclaimed award, called the Imagen, otherwise considered as the Latin Golden Globes.
Ernesto Javier Martinez is the writer and producer of the short film “La Serenata” (The Serenade).
“I always get a little bit emotional the writing of it was a healing process for me as a childhood singer and as someone who had to negotiate a father who loved me but also sometimes didn’t understand me as a queer kid.”
The short film is based on the book he wrote called When We Love Someone We Sing To Them. The story is about a love between two young boys. This is the first ever bilingual children’s book portraying this kind of love in the US.
Wednesday is the last day to vote for the short film, you can vote here.
The cast is entirely Hispanic, as well as many of those who worked on the film behind the scenes.
“The story behind it is about Latinos being able to be practitioners of the culture and for the culture to respond positively and say yeah these are our people we claim them," says Martinez.
His colleague and the Department Head of Indigenous Race and Ethnic Studies at UO, Laura Pulido says, “We very much want to see ourselves as a department that is doing what we might call popular education and that is reaching out to people beyond the academy in terms of bringing these ideas to them.” She adds, that this film is pushing a national conversation forward.
The short film had several sponsors, including a project grant from the Wayne Morse center at UO. The Co-Director of the Wayne Morse Center, Rebecca Flynn says “I think it can be at all sorts of film festivals, you know in addition to Latino film festivals and LGBTQ film festivals.”
A film hoping to spread a new story of love.
