home
blog

 

 

 

 

 

Laura Aguilar

Luis Alfaro

Don Bachardy

Ben Cuevas

D'Lo

Vaginal Davis

Tony De Carlo

Alison De La Cruz

Anthony Friedkin

Olga Garcia-Echeverria

Rudi Gerneich

Ken Gonzales-Day

Susan "Phranc" Gottlieb

Aurora Guerrero

Robert "Cyclona" Legorreta

Catherine Lord

Guglio "Gronk" Nicandro

Roy Rogers Oldenkamp

Monica Palacios

Antonio Rael

Julio Salgado

Terisa Siagatonu

Joey Terrill

Ryan Trecartin

 

 

Aurora Guerrero

  • Filmmaker Aurora Guerrero
  • Aurora's Films
  • Contribuitor Dafne Luna

 

Aurora Guerrero is a Queer Xicana filmmaker and activist. Aurora was born in  San Francisco and great up in the Bay area in cities such as El Cerrito and Berkley. She acquired her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. After acquiring her Bachelor of Arts she moved to Los Angeles to study directly at the California Institute of the Arts where she earned a Masters of Fine Arts. In 2005 as co-founder of Womyn Image Makers she directed a short film “Pura Lengua.” “Pura Lengua” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival blowing everyone away literally. She also worked on her second short “Viernes Girl” that won the 2005 HBO/New York International Latino Film Festival short film competition. Due to her amazing work at the Sundance Film Festival, in 2005, she won a spot at the Sundance Institute Ford Foundation film fellow. As a fellow she worked on her script for “Mosquita Y Mari” through the Native Indigenous Lab. “Mosquita Y Mari” is Aurora’s first feature film which debuted at Sundance but went on to win various other honors such as being an official selection for the San Francisco International Film Festival, winning Best First Feature Film and OUTfest 2012, and wins Queer Award at the Torino LGBT Film Festival. Aurora will continue working on powerful, activist based, fierce, beautiful films that will share the story of the hidden Queer Chicana community that many of us crave to watch.

 

 

 

 

 

MyM is a story of two fifteen year old Chicanas whose innocent friendship grows into a silent love. Yolanda and Mari are growing up in Huntington Park with similar yet different family backgrounds. Yolanda comes from a stable two parent household with economic stability, in which all that is expected of her is perfect grades. Mari on the other hand comes from a single mother household, undocumented background, and poor living situation. These two girls form an unthinkable bond and become close friends. Through Mosquita tutoring Mari the two girls begin to have unspoken feelings of something that may be more than friendship. The film uses various Chicano culture aspects to create an authenticity to the setting and story. For example the love between the two girls is expressed through their silent actions, longing looks, tender touches, and comfortable silence between the two. Furthermore, the setting of the film held the common household items that any Chicano household would host such as wooden furniture, fruit themed kitchens, doilies, and figurines. The film tells a story of a hidden community in popular media. The story is told in such a beautiful` way that people of all backgrounds are able to connect and see themselves in the romance between Yolanda and Mari. With her activism Aurora visits various university campuses all over California including UCLA. For UCLA’s Queer Alliance’s National Coming Out Week Aurora Gurrero and Dalila Mendez came to discuss not only Mosquita Y Mari but also their inspiration as film creators.

“Pura Lengua” and “Viernes Girl” were created as part of Womyn Image Makers. Womym Image Makers is a collective of four queer-indigenous identified filmmakers, Martiza Alvarez, Claudia Mercado, Aurora Guerrero, and Dalila Mendez.

 

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/OaeHbfvLAWEF5JBvwe05kMQOl12gvb9zQmdMInmtIjbFBTGMSRHmLwUsjQWRSLB_c90XA5nzKHqppkLHX9Np3RvdWCN8BycrDSq2xnsxIC_8e0suOdk

 

“Pura Lengua” is an 11-minute short following Reina, a queer Xicana who overcomes police brutality and a painful break-up through poetry. The film uses “punk sensibilities, bilingual dialogue, and non-sequential editing” to create a powerful in your face film that captivates its audience to a silence (Aurora Gurrero).  “Pura Lengua” was written by Martiza Alvarez and Directed by Aurora Gurrero which was screened as a featured short in the Sundance Film Festival in 2005.

 

 

“Viernes Girl” was written and directed by Aurora Guerrero and crated by Womyn Image Makers. “Viernes Girl” is about Chila, a young Salvadorean girl who excels in schools and adores music. Her older brother Hugo enjoys the ladies and has little regard that a thin bedroom wall separates his romantic moments from his sister hearing. As the week progresses along with Hugo's hook ups, Chila gets creative with her ways of interfering them. The battle between siblings changes as Friday rolls around and Chila and Hugo discover they may have something in common and their sibling bond is stronger than anything else.

 

 

 

 

 

My name is Dafne Luna and I am a 3rd year Gender Studies Major with a focus on Queer Womyn of Color. As a UCLA student I am involved with Queer Alliance and La Familia. Queer Alliance is a colition of 7 Queer Ethnic spaces that work to host different educational and activist oritenated events. La Familia is a Queer Chican@/Latin@ space for students to come together and eradicate queerphobia, empower ourselves, and educate ourselves with ourstory. As a student advocate for the Queer community I hope to gain the skills necessary to make my future a reality. I hope in my future to open a chain of LGBT Youth Service centers in the rural and conservative parts of California where LGBT Youth face the most discrimination. I feel that the community conditions of our LGBT youth are harsh in this day and age which is why suicide, cutting, depression, and drug abuse are so prominent. I hope that in my service centers to provide both basic medical health, as well as mental health counseling. I also wish to have legal services, a homeless shelter, educational counseling, a food bank, and clothes bank to keep our LGBT youth going to school in the best way possible considering their situation. I guess my ultimate goal is to give back to my community of Queer People of Color.