Check out the trailer to our short film, Chévere con salsa, about a couple of best friends from Washington Heights navigating the tumultuousness of sexual politics in the Dominican culture.
Time has become the thorn in my side that reveals the fine lines on my skin and reminds me of our mortality; that we are not eternal, and that, someday, all that will be left of us is the dust from which we came. Well, the dust and the stories. I used to think of stories as finite. Because they happen, and nothing about them changes no matter how we twist and turn them, assign meaning to them, weep over them, or try to forget them. But through my father I've learned that they are fluid and ever-changing so long as we continue to tell them, whichever way we please. For anyone that knows him, you know what I'm talking about. There weren't ten lights left on in the house, there were thirty six. Bats don't eat up to 500 mosquitos in one night, they eat 5,000 of them, and so on. The numbers are arbitrary for him, and so they are for me. The same go for his stories. I can't exactly tell if they're all accurate, but that doesn't really matter. Everybody loves a good story. I used to draw them out, write them down, and retell them until my audience grew listener's fatigue. Only recently have I become interested in the importance of the stories that came long before me, my time, of a world I never knew. Ever-changing as they are, they are the colorful background to the landscape of our present. I encourage everyone to seek out these stories and fill their canvases with as much of that rich history that is available to them. This video is a short segment from an interview I had where I got to sit with my uncle, Guelo, and my father, to listen to all of their greatest cinema memories as a part of my short film, "Five-Picture Tuesday" (plug). It's subtitled as best as I could, but some of the words in Dominican slang simply don't translate too well. Predominantly the word tigre which I simply translated as street folks, but it's so much more than that. See, a tigre is more of a wise guy with a lot of street smarts, is a little rough around the edges, and is almost always working an angle. You can easily call him a thug, but it's commonly used in a less nefarious or condescening way. Sometimes, when I do something to outwit my father, he will call me a tigra. In this short interview segment, it's not used to descibe necessarily criminal behavior, but rather, an unpolished, bad-mannered, rowdy group of people. Enjoy! |
About this BlogHere you will perhaps find a little bit about things I love, a little bit about things I hate, but all things that I enjoy writing about. Archives
November 2018
|