Festival media contacts:
Herrera Communications (For this event only.)
Brenda Herrera – [email protected]
Madeline Padilla – [email protected]
Cal State L.A. announces new venue, featured artist for annual festival
7th Annual Reel Rasquache Art & Film Festival
at Regency Academy 6 Cinemas June 4-6
LOS ANGELES, CA – Celebrating its seventh year, the Reel Rasquache Art & Film Festival—originally hosted on the Cal State L.A. campus—will be held at the Regency Academy 6 Cinemas in Pasadena Friday-Sunday, June 4-6.
With continued Cal State L.A. partnership, this new venue provides multiple screens allowing the Festival to accommodate an even larger audience. Reel Rasquache Festival Director John Ramirez, professor of communication studies at Cal State L.A., states, “While this Festival has been reputable and successful in its own right, bringing it into the community, to a bona fide movie house raises its profile and provides it the opportunity to begin joining the constellation of film festivals that make Los Angeles a unique destination for appreciating and celebrating cinema.”
Expanding the focus to incorporate Latino art into the program, the Festival will highlight featured artist Eloy Torrez, who will showcase his art work throughout the three-day event. Torres is best known for his mural, “The Pope of Broadway,” depicting the late Anthony Quinn at the Victor Clothing Company building, located in downtown Los Angeles.
Reel Rasquache provides a forum to acknowledge the contributions of U.S. Latinos in the entertainment industry and the arts. The Festival will showcase some 20 recent Latino-produced and/or themed films produced nationally and internationally, most of them Los Angeles premieres. Together with guest filmmaker presentations, panels and workshops, the Festival provides a unique local celebration of films by and about U.S. Latino communities and experiences.
Emphasizing a range of media, from feature-length films and documentaries, to short subjects and animation, the Festival encompasses a number of themes that focus on the rich diversity of U.S. Latino culture and history. The Festival annually brings a broad base of grassroots and professional community members together with U.S. Latino film and video independents and entertainment industry representatives.
As much as film and television have been powerful tools for perpetuating stereotypes, so too do film and television provide effective tools and weapons for breaking those stereotypes and representing the many dimensions of the U.S. Latina/o experience. It is in this sense of the word “rasquache” that the films in the Reel Rasquache Art & Film Festival weave their characters, stories, themes, and styles into a cross-section of the dynamic fabric of U.S. Latino identities.
For more information or a complete program on the three-day Reel Rasquache Art & Film Festival, visit www.reelrasquache.org or call (323) 343-4207.
# # #
Working for California since 1947: The 175-acre hilltop campus of California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 210,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds—reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six Colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to a unique university center for gifted students as young as 12. Programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include an NEH- and Rockefeller-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a growing forensic science program, housed in the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. www.calstatela.edu