WE ARE HABLANDO

WE ARE HABLANDO



Featuring: Roly Chang Barrero Roberto Rodriguez-Montoya
Videography: Raul Ferrera-Balanquet and Joe Castel

Music: La Tarima de Locombia

Video 3/4", Duration 14 min., color, 1991

SYNOPSIS: Produced during the Gulf war, this experimental documentary brings the issues of censorship, family values, gay relationship, language, and culture within the US/Latino Diaspora to a global level. Mexican American Roberto Rodriguez and Cuban American Roly Chang Barrero speak about artistic censorship, identity, and sexuality from their personal experience.

Ferrera-Balanquet's "experimental documentary" offers a multi-layered examination of personal, artistic and global censorship. Cuban-American artist Roly Chang Barrero recounts two occasions when his work was censored, once by a curator in Florida who feared that his treatment of the clashes between the Marielitos and first-generation Cuban immigrants would fan the flame of the controversy, and once when a gallery owned by the United Methodist Church rejected his piece on the AIDS crisis. Roberto Rodriguez, a gay Chicano man, recalls his initial subjection to censorship when he was forbidden by family members to speak English at home, a censoring similarly invoked at school where he was discouraged from speaking Spanish. Roberto also encountered censorship in the purported "liberal" atmosphere of the university campus where he was chagrined to experience a negation of his sexuality and, perhaps most surprising, a denial of his working-class identity. The testimonies of Barrero and Rodriguez are intertwined with videotext concerning the sexual/ethnic identity of the videomaker, culturally informed footage of a Latino celebration and the media-censored broadcasts of the Gulf War

Credits: Producer/Director: Raúl Ferrera-Balanquet; Videography: Joe Castel, Raúl Ferrera-Balanquet; Music: La Tarima de Locombia