Whenever she sees me, a co-worker of mine greets me with a great big smile and a “Theeere she is!” She’s disarmed many a fellow co-worker with these words because it’s becoming part of our vocabularies. Exhibit A: The other day I heard another co-worker pass by her and beat her to it. So I chuckled as I was leaving the opening night screening of the Native American Film and Video Festival and realized it had become part of mine as well.
As I was leaving the opening night screening, I passed by a table and saw a familiar face staring back at me. It was Zulay Saravino, the protagonist of a documentary made in 1989 entitled “Zulay Facing the 21st Century.” I remember this film well because Roselly Torres Rojas, who then worked at the Latin American Video Archives (LAVA), the only distributor at the time, helped me edit clips from it (and other films) when I presented a paper on Latin American indigenous film back in 2004 and I also analyzed it in some papers in grad school. I liked it so much that I bought a VHS copy for Lehman College’s Leonard Lief Library when I was the Latin American Studies librarian there. I was saddened when LAVA closed in part because, without a distributor, I knew many would miss out on seeing this treasure. But, that night, as I passed by the table, I smiled and said to myself, “Theeeere she is!” – right on the cover of the Documentary Educational Resources (DER) catalog! As I leafed through it, I noticed the DER also distributes a few other titles from Latin America, including one that screened at the Margaret Mead Festival last year: “Secrets of the Tribe” (which I hope to check out on Netflix soon). So, if you are interested in building your library’s collection, check DER out.
