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Los Angeles Times
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
From ICE raids and spirituality to sex work and babysitting, ‘Trans Los Angeles' documents life in the city
As Mayela got off the bus, she saw Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers raiding the pupusería she worked at in Los Angeles. The undocumented transgender Salvadoran woman watched from behind a car as her coworkers — including another trans Central American woman — were handcuffed and taken away in broad daylight. 'I had so much hope when I arrived to this country,' Mayela , played by Fernanda Celarie, says in her prayers later on. 'Now that I've begun to feel comfortable living here, this is a nightmare. Why so much pain and suffering?' 'Trans Los Angeles' director Kase Peña wrote that scene into her feature film well before the ongoing ICE raids and subsequent protests in L.A., but the harsh reality of fear for the many undocumented people of the city was something she knew she needed to include. 'When I wrote it in 2021, ICE was a hot subject, and then it died down,' Peña told The Times ahead of her film's premiere at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival on May 30. 'My film was always relevant and needed. The fact that who we have in the White House right now makes my film even more relevant, more needed now that he's brought the ICE thing back. That part [of the movie] is not going to look old. It's unfortunate, but that's going on.' This is what Peña set out to do with her feature-length movie, that is composed of three non-overlapping vignettes sharing a wide-ranging set of experiences that Angelenos face daily. Born and raised in New York, the Dominican American director moved to L.A. nearly a decade ago and was inspired to make her film after noticing a lack of representation for trans stories that reflected the realities of her community. 'When I started hanging with my trans community here in Los Angeles, my intentions were not to tell those stories,' Peña said. 'It was something that I felt like there's a void here, and I'm the right person to tell it because I'm both a filmmaker and a trans person.' While the storylines of 'Trans Los Angeles' drew inspiration from Peña's personal experiences and fellow members of the trans community's stories, the film's format was influenced by global cinema. The director pulled from the seminal Soviet/Cuban political work 'Soy Cuba' to land on the vignette structure of her film. She had originally wanted to mirror the 1964 movie's four episodes but was unable to secure funding — a common dilemma faced by truly independent filmmakers — for her fourth snippet, which centered around a transmasculine character. 'A lot of people ask you questions like, 'Why don't the stories intertwine?' It's because it makes my life more difficult as an independent filmmaker,' she noted. 'If you give me a million dollars I can make the stories intertwined, but I was only getting enough money to shoot one segment at a time. I didn't have money to shoot all three segments.' These restraints forced 'Trans Los Angeles' to be filmed over the course of several years. The first vignette, 'Period,' was shot in March 2021; 'Feliz Cumpleaños' was filmed soon after in June; 'Trans Day of Remembrance' had to be pushed due to finances and was eventually recorded in November 2023 on Peña's iPhone. That last segment was shot using 'stolen locations' for exterior scene — the crew showed up to a spot and recorded without having film permits or insurance. 'That's one reason why I decided to shoot it with my iPhone,' she said of the guerilla filmmaking strategy. 'If somebody would have came to me and said, 'Hey, what are you guys doing over there?' [We'd say,] we're just shooting something for Instagram on my iPhone. They'd be like, 'Oh, okay.'' The vignette 'Period' centers around Vergara, a formerly incarcerated trans Latinx woman played by actor and model Carmen Carrera. The character lands a job as a nanny to a preteen girl while doing sex work on the side. Carrera says she was drawn to the project because Peña's script allowed her to portray a three-dimensional character. 'That is valuable because oftentimes us trans people are told that we're not valuable, or that we're wrong for existing, or that we shouldn't be around kids, or we shouldn't have responsibility or be people who are a contributing factor to society,' Carrera told The Times. 'It's a reflection of my own life too. I am an active girlfriend, I am an active daughter, I'm an active sister. The trans experience is just a small part of my life. It's not the totality of my human experience. I was just happy I felt more related to Vergara because it's how I have always felt as well. In my own life, people judge me all the time.' Another aspect of 'Period' that connected Carrera to Vergara was the character's relationship with her mother. 'I think as a first-generation American you have that extra layer of [thinking], 'My parents came to this country and sacrificed so much, and if I don't make them proud it's gonna be a waste,'' she said. Central to the plot of 'Period' was the community that Vergara was able to tap into thanks to the TransLatin@ Coalition, a real-life advocacy group based out of L.A. that seeks to create safe spaces for transgender, gender expansive and intersex immigrant women in the city. 'The reason the TransLatin@ Coalition is in the film is because that came from me,' Peña said. 'I in real life have gone to TransLatin@ to seek the services that they provide for trans people of color. Because I'm a writer and I go there, I see this place and I'm like, 'I can tell the story and include them.' ' The second segment of the feature, 'Trans Day of Remembrance,' is named after the annual day of observance on Nov. 20 of those whose lives were lost due to transphobia. The story follows Phoebe (Austria Wang), a Taiwanese American transgender woman, as she maneuvers her romantic life and processes the death of one of her fellow trans friends. For this vignette, Peña intentionally cast transmasculine actor Jordan Gonzalez to play Phoebe's cis boyfriend, Sam. . 'We've had cisgender people play trans roles, and it's the first time [Gonzalez has played a cisgender role]. It was something that they've been wanting to do for a while, but this industry doesn't see them as that, because they only see them as trans,' Peña said. 'It was something that they yearned for and perhaps now, because they've done it, other people would consider casting them that way too.' The final segment, 'Feliz Cumpleaños,' portrays an ICE raid on a Salvadoran business while telling the story of Mayela's hopes and aspirations for her life as she prepares for her baptism at an LGBTQ+ friendly church. As an outsider to the Salvadoran experience, Peña leaned on actual members of the Central American country to adjust and approve of her script. 'I want to acknowledge that I'm not from El Salvador. As a person of color, as a Dominican filmmaker, as a transgender filmmaker, I have often seen filmmakers from other communities come and tell my story, and they don't check in,' Peña explained. 'They think they can just write it. They don't get it right sometimes, and and then they go win major awards. I didn't want to disrespect the community like that.' Peña emphasizes that the movie tells stories that get to the heart of the struggle and beauty of being human in L.A. But ultimately her film is only a slice of the overall trans experience, she says, a unique series of stories informed by a writer whose ethos can be encapsulated in her own views on her own trans identity. 'For me, being transgender is not about passing. Being transgender is about having the freedom to be who you are,' Peña said. 'I'm not trying to look like a woman. This is me. That's it, whatever that means.'
Los Angeles Times
29-05-2025
- Los Angeles Times
How ‘Uvalde Mom' director Anayansi Prado captured the heart of a town in trauma
Three years ago, an armed young man entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two teachers. Hundreds of law enforcement officials reportedly stood around the school campus for more than an hour without approaching the shooter. In the midst of the inaction, one mom — Angeli Rose Gomez — pleaded with officers to take action or let her go in to get her two children and nephew. She was apprehended and handcuffed, but ultimately talked her way out of arrest before she sprinted inside the school to grab the kids. Videos on social media captured the moments that Gomez brought her sons and nephew out of the school. The Texas field worker and mother of two was quickly dubbed a hero in national and local publications for her courage. The new documentary film 'Uvalde Mom' follows Gomez after becoming nationally recognized — while examining the forces at play in the Uvalde community which allowed for the shooting to take place, as well as the aftermath of such a tragedy. 'All I wanted that day was my kids to come out of the school alive, and that's what I got,' Gomez says in one pivotal moment in the film. 'I don't want to be called a hero. I don't want to be looked at as the hero because the only job that I did that day was being a mom.' The feature's director Anayansi Prado was 'moved' and 'horrified' by what had happened and felt motivated to make a film about the event after seeing members of the affected families on TV. 'I saw that there were Latinos, they were Mexican American, that it was a border town, that it was an agricultural farming town, and that really resonated with me and with communities I've done film work with before,' Prado told The Times. Prado began reaching out to people in Uvalde shortly after the shooting, but didn't hear back from anyone for over two months due to the inundation of media requests everyone in the city was receiving. The only person to reply to her was Gomez. Ahead of the film's screening Saturday at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Prado spoke with The Times about the process and the challenges of making her documentary. This interview has been edited and shortened for clarity. Was the idea always for this project to be a feature-length film? Or were there talks of making it a short or a series? I've always thought about it as a feature because I really wanted to dive in and understand Uvalde as a character. I wanted to understand the history of the criminal justice system, the educational system. I knew I wanted to make something that was going to be of a longer form rather than just a piece that was about Angeli or something. And a few people told me this would make a great short, but as I uncovered more about Uvalde, I was like, 'No, Uvalde itself has its own history, just like a person.' When it came to choosing Angeli, was she the first and only person who responded to your outreach? I think the people in town were oversaturated with media coverage, and Angeli was the one that got back to me. What was really interesting is that I learned on that first trip [to Uvalde] about her backstory and I learned about how the criminal justice system had failed her. I saw a parallel there of how the system failed the community the day of the shooting and how it was failing this woman also individually. I wanted to play with those two stories, the macro and the personal. Once I learned who she was, beyond the mom who ran into the school, I was like, 'I have to tell this woman's story.' How did you go about balancing her personal stuff and the failures that happened on a larger scale? So much of the way the film is structured is reflective of my own experience as a filmmaker. It was a sort of surreal world, these two worlds were going on: what was happening to Angeli and then what was going on outside with the lack of accountability and the cover-up. So that informed the way that I wanted to structure the film. In terms of the personal, it was a journey to gain Angeli's trust. At some point at the beginning, she wasn't sure she wanted to participate in the film, and so I told her, 'You don't owe me anything. I'm a stranger, but all I ask is that you give me a chance to earn your trust.' And she was like, 'OK.' From there on, she opened up and, pretty quickly, we became close and she trusted me. I was very cognizant [of] her legal past and even the way she's perceived by some folks. I also didn't want Angeli to come off as a victim and people to feel sorry for her, but I still wanted to tell her story in a way where you get mad at the system for failing her. What kind of struggles did you have trying to get in communication with some of the officials of the city? We used a lot of news [archives] to represent that part of the story. The [authorities] weren't giving any interviews, they were just holding press conferences. So access was limited, but also the majority of the time that we were filming, we were very low-key about the production — because Angeli was on probation and there was retaliation for her speaking to the media. We tried to keep it under wraps that we were filming, so not a lot of people knew about it [besides] her family. Obviously other folks in town [were] part of the film, like her friend Tina and family members. Outside of that, it was too risky to let other people in town know what was going on. Ultimately I wanted to make ['Uvalde Mome'] a personal portrait. I was just very selective on the people that we absolutely needed to interview. I'm happy with Tina, who's an activist in town, and Arnie, a survivor of the shooting and a school teacher, [plus] Angeli's legal team. I felt like those were people we needed to tell a fuller story. But we just couldn't be out in the open making a film about her and let people know. What kind of reception have you gotten from people of Uvalde that have seen the film? We had our premiere at South by Southwest, which was great. A lot of folks came from Uvalde and spoke about how, almost three years later, a lot of this stuff is still going on. Every time Gov. Greg Abbott came on-screen, people would scream, 'Loser!' It was really moving to have those screenings. As was expected from the folks who are not fans of Angeli, there was some backlash. It's the same narrative you see in the film of, 'She's a criminal, don't believe her.' It's a town that is an open wound. I just try to have compassion for people. Ultimately, Angeli's story is the story of one person in Uvalde of many that need to continue to be told. And I hope that other filmmakers, journalists and other storytellers continue to tell the story there, especially with the lack of closure and accountability. I'm happy that the film is putting Uvalde back into the headlines in some way; that way we don't forget about it. Had you ever spent an extended amount of time in Texas before? I had been to Texas, but I hadn't done a project in Texas. Because I'm an outsider, it was very important for me to hire a 100% local Texas crew for this film. My crew was entirely Texas-based, from our PAs to our sound to our DPs. I also wanted to have a majority Texas-born Mexican American crew so that they could guide me. We began production in September of 2022 and the atmosphere was very tense. This is a story that is deeply rooted in the Latino community and the tension about the law enforcement in Uvalde. What was it like dealing with that tension and how did you personally feel that when you went into the town? When I got to Uvalde, I saw that the majority of the Latino community had been there for several generations. You would think a town with that kind of Mexican American history, and them being the majority, that they'd be pretty cemented and represented, right? It was really eye-opening to see [how] these folks are still considered second-class citizens. A lot of them are being repressed. And then you have folks that get in positions of power, but they're whitewashed in line with the white conservative agenda. So even those that are able to get into positions of power don't lean towards the community. They turn their back on it. I heard from folks that the history of neglect was what led to the response that day at Robb Elementary. And they're like, 'Yeah, that's what happens on that side of town. You call the cops, they don't come. Our schools are run-down.' You really see the disparity. This was a Mexican American community that had been there for a long time. It's fascinating how the conservative white community, even if they're the smaller part of the population, they can still hold the power.
