IFS Film Festival - Dogs & Tacos
Alma Pantaleon’s plan of getting through her after-school work shift and heading home to check on her younger siblings is derailed when a former boyfriend deposits his little brother in her care and speeds away with the police on his tail.
Interview with Writer/Director Steve Bachrach and Producer Ceindy Mata
Watch Dogs & Tacos here:
Congratulations! Why did you make your film?
We began working on this project a few years ago, as a collective dedicated to making films that were entertaining but that also portrayed life for adolescents and young adults in the notorious neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles in non-stereotypical ways.
Here’s a bit of back-story on our group’s origins (Steve narrating):
After finishing graduate film studies at Cal Arts in the 90’s, I had a go at the festival circuit with my 16 mm thesis film, “House of Pies”, which played at Tribeca Film Center in New York, Nashville FF (then called “Sinking Creek FF”), the Directors Guild in L.A., and. various other spots. This was before the explosion of film fests we see today. Shortly after, I accepted an offer to establish a filmmaking academy at Thomas Jefferson High School in South-Central Los Angeles, an institution that by the late 90s was renowned primarily for an extended stretch of academic failure.
I had a friend teaching English there and he introduced me to the Principal, Virginia Preciado, who offered me this unique opportunity. I thought it would last for a couple of years, but it quickly turned into a more serious commitment with generous support arriving from Eastman Kodak and Sony Pictures. Carmela Perez, Abraham Osuna, and Ceindy Mata (all producers and story co-creators of “Dogs & Tacos”) were part of the program, which over several years presented 20 films, mostly docs, on teen life in South-Central, at the Sundance festival. There were other festival exhibitions for the students, who most importantly were graduating and heading to university at a rate much higher than the rest of the high school’s student body.
I ended up staying at the school 10 years before founding an independent film/theatre-based charter high school in the same neighborhood and heading that for another 7 years. Blanca is Carmela’s little sister and she graduated from the charter school version of the Academy before getting her degree in Social Work from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. She’s the youngest of our group and naturally more fluent in navigating the social media universe.
After innumerable brainstorming sessions with Carmela, Ceindy, Abraham and a few other former students, I wrote “Pueblo Venenoso”, about a young girl in South-Central who was struggling to hold her family together after a family tragedy. The title is a reference to an old telenovela I had watched religiously along with a group of students a few years prior. The action in “PV” revolves around composite characters from the neighborhood, with the character of “Alma”, a smart, feisty, hard-working 17 year-old girl with a complex, tragedy-riddled backstory, as the sort of fulcrum of the story. “Pueblo Venenoso” earned us support from The Sundance Institute here in the U.S. They suggested we create a short film featuring our main character in her world to get more practical experience and to prove to potential backers that we were the real deal. “Dogs and Tacos”, finished in the fall of 2016, is that project.
The short was a real learning and re-learning experience for all of us. We were incredibly fortunate to recruit the super-talented and passionate young female cinematographer Nausheen Dadabhoy (the Academy Award-nominated short La Femme et le TGV, etc….) to the cause. For quite some time we were having a hard time nailing down the casting of the principal roles until Michael Sanford and his team (“The Artist”, etc…) jumped in to lend a hand. Lead and supporting actresses Venecia Troncoso and Laura Patalano (both featuring in the Sundance hit Mosquita y Mari) signed on, along with the up-and-coming young male actors David Gurrola and Cesar Hernandez.
Imagine I’m a member of the audience. Why should I watch this film?
Hopefully, you’re interested in a story that accurately and (if we can be immodest) somewhat entertainingly portrays an intelligent, and industrious young Latina in a non-stereotypical South-Central Los Angeles setting just going about her business and trying to do the best she can for her siblings.
How do personal and universal themes work in your film?
We chose to focus on something that is quite common in our neighborhood, a young Latina, often the oldest girl in the family, shouldering an enormous degree of responsibility. This manifests itself in Alma’s attempts at oversight over her wayward younger brother, Junior (referenced several times but never seen); in her need to bring in income via an after school job; and in her unanticipated kid-sitting and disciplining of an old boyfriend’s little brother. Is it a universal theme that girls have more sense and are more reliable than boys?…Perhaps.
How have the script and film evolved over the course of their development?
The short film’s script was originally (no surprise here) longer, with additional time devoted to Alma’s working at the taqueria, cooking, cleaning, dealing with more customers. It was vital to us to capture a girl who has to work hard, do homework, keep siblings in line, a type of multi-tasking that is not quite the current stereotype of teenagers spending much of their time goofing around on social media. We’re not trying to beat a dead horse here, but accumulating “Likes” and “LOLs” is not something the oldest girl in an immigrant family in an urban section of the U.S. has time for.
Once all those scenes were in the rough cut, it was clear that many of these interludes and points we were trying to make were clogging up the narrative flow, so we had to be a bit more strategic and make fewer of those moments score the points we wanted to achieve while keeping the story moving. My good friend the writer-director Mark Rosner, who executive produced the short, and his editor friend Eric Allen were instrumental in suggesting those trims. Abraham was our editorial supervisor, and he was virtually on 24-hour call fixing the innumerable issues I’d create while stumbling my way through the worlds of codecs and bit-rates and whatnot.
What type of feedback have you received so far?
Well, we’ve been rejected by more festivals than have accepted ”Dogs & Tacos” to date. That’s feedback of a fairly brutal sort. But we’ve been accepted to a good number so far at this juncture, now a bit past the half-way mark of our festival life-span, and we’ve managed to find ways to attend the vast majority of them. Carmela, Blanca, and I recently drove straight through from L.A. to San Antonio for CineFestival. A couple weeks later I hopped on a plane to IFF Boston, etc.… It’s incredibly important to us to present the material and see and hear and feel the audience’s reactions. We’re trying to grow an audience via word of mouth, and of course, the internet.
Viewers and programmers have told us that the portrayal of a young woman of color who is responsible, smart, and gritty strikes a chord with them. During post-screening Q&As, which in the shorts universe are always shared with several other films, our story tends to garner more than its fair share of commentary. Our subject matter and approach usually stand in sharp contrast to most of the other films in the program, virtually all of which are smart and quite well-made, with less dialogue and probably more atmosphere than ours.
Has the feedback surprised or challenged your point of view?
We did receive a number of interesting comments a week ago in Boston. At one point in a great Q & A a female audience member commented on the fact that in Alma’s considerable amount of dialogue, she never discusses guys with anyone, even when she is speaking with another woman. She seems to have more pressing issues on her mind. The audience member even mentioned a specific word for this rare phenomenon, the obligatory male crush mention or plot point, but we can’t remember the exact term.
What are you looking to achieve by having your film more visible on www.wearemovingstories.com? Who do you need to come on board (producers, sales agents, buyers, distributors, film festival directors, journalists) to amplify this film’s message?
It seems to make sense for us to combine these 2 questions. For one thing, we’re pretty thrilled that you contacted us, that something about our little film called to you from among the vast number of projects and festivals on your radar. So that’s a very welcome bit of affirmation for which we’d like to express some gratitude.
a) We would love additional festival programmers and other journalists to take an interest in “Dogs & Tacos” and our feature project, “Pueblo Venenoso”. As we’d said, the film seems to really go against mainstream expectations for shorts, and this has seemingly worked to our advantage in the festivals to which we’ve been accepted, in terms of audience response, Q&A focus, etc…. IFF Boston was a great experience just a couple weeks ago, and is probably the highest-profile festival to which we’ve been accepted so far, along with LAshortsFest and FESANCOR in Chile. But we’ve struggled to crack the few “megafests” to which we’ve applied. We know the film has some eccentricities that likely get us marked down by programmers: a surplus of dialogue; some fairly dark night exteriors; a couple edits that may not have been 100% satisfying to us but represented the best solutions available… Yet it is what we’d intended it to be, and we’re proud and pleased that we’ve gained invaluable production and post-prod experience, and attracted some fantastic new partners in our group of actors and our core crew. Hopefully some huge festival programmer will be intrigued by your piece and offer us plane tickets and copious amounts of top-notch swag if we relent and agree to attend and augment their possibly non-existent urban Latinx content.
b) Turning our attention to the main reason we made D&T in the first place: we still have a long way to go before we can roll camera on our feature “Pueblo Venenoso”. We don’t have an experienced feature-length producer lined up yet, nor financing, nor distribution. We hope to schedule a sit-down with our Sundance advisors here in Los Angeles in the next few months, but they’re kept pretty busy all the time with multiple artists, various educational and outreach efforts, and so on. Your approaching us helps raise our visibility, so thanks again for the opportunity. Anyone who reads this and is interested in collaborating with us is hereby invited to get in touch!
Sales agents/buyers/distributors are not necessary at this time for the short, since we will never be able to secure music rights beyond the festival-rights stage, due to the expense (many of the songs used in our film are Mexican standards and the 2 hip-hop songs have 7 or 8 writers and artists involved; some of them are quite well-known.)
What type of impact and/or reception would you like this film to have?
Obviously we hope people are moved by the story, by the intelligence and intensity of our main character, and intrigued by our perspective. We hope they find the filmmaking to be solid and even stylish to a degree, despite the fact that principal photography was 4 days with a small (but hard-working and competent) crew, tiny budget and a minimal amount of equipment.
We would love for audiences get into the story and in particular to the main character, Alma, and the South Central L.A. setting, which is a neighborhood that rarely is shown in any depth (beyond as a staging area for violent episodes) on-screen. As has been noted above, we want to continue to make work in this vein.
We know that these types of stories are getting more opportunities than in the past and perhaps the dreadful new U.S. Administration is inadvertently assisting in this shift by stimulating more urgency and critical stances from the art-making community and activists here and around the world.
What’s a key question that will help spark a debate or begin a conversation about this film?
This is Ceindy Mata taking this question and wrapping the interview up:
I think it is really the prominence that immigration issues and stories of displaced and marginalized populations have been receiving over the past months. One thing we’ve observed all this time in South Central is that it’s really the first generation born in the new land that has to power the families forward. The parents, usually with minimal formal education, pretty much sacrifice themselves and their ambitions to do everything possible to sustain the family on an economic level, pinning all their hopes on their kids. The younger generation is much quicker to assimilate the expectations and values of the their new home.
In Latino families in our community, there is a tendency toward radically different expectations for each gender. Female children are charged with being responsible for younger kids and helping maintain the home, and oftentimes they tend to go farther in school. Carmela played that role in her family and I did in mine. Guys seem in many cases (but not all, obviously) to be more easily distracted by all sorts of things: soccer, gangs, etc… The attitudes and/or the workload of parents seem to allow this in many cases.
Our character of Alma displays these characteristics, working to find out what her younger brother is up to while simultaneously working to solve a mystery about this kid who’s been dumped out on the sidewalk by her old boyfriend, before the latter drives off with police sirens closing in.
Is this a phenomenon that manifests itself among different immigrant populations in other lands?
Is the degree of responsibility immigrant kids are expected to shoulder realistic, or even healthy? How can society assist their development and reap the advantages of the injection of a new wave of hard-working, motivated youth with unique perspectives? To do so probably involves expenditures in after-school programs, neighborhood centers, instead of tax breaks for the new President and his friends.
Would you like to add anything else?
Not at this moment. This has been a pretty complete homework assignment and we’ve probably jammed in much more stuff than you ever wanted.
What are the key creatives developing or working on now?
We’re working on a script re-write and seeking backing for our narrative feature “Pueblo Venenoso”. Our core cast from the short is attached to the larger project, that incorporates the lessons we’ve learned writing, shooting, editing, and screening “Dogs & Tacos”.
Interview: May 2017
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We Are Moving Stories embraces new voices in drama, documentary, animation, TV, web series and music video. If you have just made a film - we'd love to hear from you. Or if you know a filmmaker - can you recommend us? More info: Carmela
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Dogs & Tacos
Alma Pantaleon’s plan of getting through her after-school work shift and heading home to check on her younger siblings is derailed when a former boyfriend deposits his little brother in her care and speeds away with the police on his tail.
Length: 16’ 36”
Writer/Director Steve Bachrach
Producers: Carmela Pérez, Ceindy Mata, Blanca Pérez, Abraham Osuna, Steve Bachrach
About Steve Bachrach (writer/director): You can take anything from that giant mass of text above, the most important element is likely his Sundance Fellow status. He earned his Bachelors degree in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.
Ceindy Mata (producer) grew up in Los Angeles and is the oldest child of parents who immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador. She has recently earned her certification as a public school teacher in Los Angeles. Dogs & Tacos is her first professional production credit.
Carmela Perez (Producer) is the eldest daughter of parents who immigrated from Mexico, has spent the bulk of her post-high-school life working to help support her parents and siblings. She is a story contributor to both “Dogs & Tacos” and “Pueblo Venenoso”. D&T is her first professional production credit.
Abraham Gerardo Osuna (producer) served as post production supervisor on “Dogs & Tacos”. He is a graduate of U.C.L.A.’s Film and Chicano Studies Undergraduate programs, and has also earned an M.F.A, in filmmaking from the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, CA.
Key Cast: Venecia Troncoso (Alma), David Gurrola (Jorge), Laura Patalano (Doña Teresa), Cesar Hernandez (Nilsen)
Looking for: Feature Film Producers, Funders, Film Festival Directors
Social Media Handles:
Dogs & Tacos Instagram/FB: @DogsTacos2016
Division Del Norte Facebook: https:www.facebook.com/DiviDelNorte/
Division Del Norte Twitter: Div_Del_Norte
Division Del Norte Instagram: @division_del_norte
Website: DIvisionDelNorteFilms.com
Where can I see “Dogs & Tacos” in the next month?
Los Angeles Independent Filmmakers’ Showcase, Music Hall Theatre, Beverly Hills, California, USA, May 6, 6 P.M. PST
New Haven International Film Festival, New Haven, CT, USA , May 6, 3 P.M. EST
Philadelphia Latino Film Festival, Philadelphia, PA, USA, June 2-4, Date/Time TBA
Lighthouse Film Festival, Long Beach Island, New Jersey, USA June 8-11, Date/Time TBA