A Dominican grandmother in outer space is just the beginning. Philly’s Latino Film Festival highlights flights of imagination through July

Philadelphia’s arts and culture scene may be best known for its murals and restaurants. But for at least the next several weeks, film is taking over.

The Philadelphia Latino Film Festival (PHLAFF) began over Memorial Day weekend, and will continue through the beginning of July. Latino filmmakers from 25 countries will show their feature films, shorts, and other projects through in-person events and virtual screenings, with a schedule available at phlaff.org. This is the festival’s 12th year running, and its longest event to date.

“Our mission is really to nurture creatives and foster [and] support cross-cultural dialogue,” said Marángeli Mejía-Rabell, the director of PHLAFF. She explained that the festival will showcase a diverse array of projects, from student films to Academy Awards submissions.

“At the core, we’re here to create spaces for community building,” she said.

Mejía-Rabell hopes that the festival builds a cross-cultural dialogue between Latinos and non-Latinos, but also between Latinos with different lived experiences. She believes that film, through both documentary and fictional storytelling, has a unique way of exploring that which shapes a person and a community.

“You’re talking to somebody who fell in love with film as a child. And one of the reasons was that it gave me a window to things that I didn’t know,” she said. “Film can be a very powerful tool for us to build community and to continue to promote change, and empower [people] and empower voices and make sure that they’re not silenced.”

While Eunice Levis was growing up in the Bronx, it was easy to settle into one perception of the world, where her Dominican friends and family were never the heroes of the story.

“I never got to see people who look like my family save the world,” she said about the TV and movies she grew up watching. It was inspiring to see people around her in real life build within their means, using their hands to fix up cars and work magic with hair.

But now, “I [want] to go beyond that,” she said.

Levis is a Philadelphia-based writer and director, as well as an adjunct faculty member at St. Joseph’s University, where she teaches courses in film. She is screening two of her films at an in-person PHLAFF event Friday, June 2 at the Barnes Foundation, including her sci-fi short, Ro & the Stardust.

It is the story of a teenager and her terminally ill grandmother. Together, they work to build a rocket ship that will send the grandmother to outer space and fulfill her dying wish.

Through the film, Levis wanted to pay homage to the people of color who have been integral yet mostly unheralded contributors to space missions and other feats of engineering. But she also aimed to flip that narrative at the same time, putting Ro and her grandmother in the lead and total control of their own space mission.

“Reimagining it is really helpful to heal and also to just make sense of why we’re not represented now. And hopefully [it will] inspire others to go for it,” she said.

Levis hopes to develop the two sci-fi films she is screening into larger projects; she envisions Ro & the Stardust as a feature-length film, and her other short, InVade, as a TV show. They would be unique entries in a genre that is still too homogenous.

“I’m very much the minority, especially when I wanna make [films] bilingual, which both my films are. Or if I want a Latino of color to be the lead. It’s something that’s very brand new [in science fiction],” she said. “People aren’t used to seeing people of color, particularly people that are of African descent, speaking other languages besides English in America.”

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In making those films and carving out her space in the genre, Levis learned to lean on the people who were already supportive of breaking film conventions, instead of seeking approval from those closed off to it. She produced Ro & the Stardust with help from the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and its short-film incubator program. They didn’t question her ideas, but helped bring them to life.

“I wanted to do it in a junkyard, I wanted my lead to be a woman of a certain age,” she said. “There were so many things that would’ve been a red flag for other people. They were just like, ‘yeah, go for it.’”