2023-06-07 17:38:00
the filmmaker Rudy Valdez premiered his documentary Translatorsfocused on the responsibility of immigrant children from help their parents communicate in the United States. With a look at reality, the director wanted to make visible the different situations that Latino families experience in the North American country, where many times they do not speak English and require great support to carry out basic activities.
More than 11 million children in the United States act as translators for their families on important matters, according to data that Valdez himself revealed to Up to date. That is why he wanted to focus on this theme for his next audiovisual project, which premiered at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and will be screened at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York later this month.
in the film The daily life of three Latino families living in the US is shown.: a Guatemalan, a Venezuelan and a Colombian. They all have one characteristic in common: parents do not know how to speak English and it is their children who help them in making important decisions or procedures. Harye, Densel and Virginia, the child protagonists, narrate their experience and their true stories.
“All children need their parents, but for Densel, 11, Harye, 13, Virginia, 16, and the more than 11 million children in the US who are the only English speakers in their family, sometimes that relationship changes. This is the untold story of children who act as translators for their family in matters that are sometimes more adults than they are,” she describes the official page of the documentary.
Although it was not easy to find those who wanted to participate in the short film, which lasts just over 20 minutes, Valdez hopes the result sends a substantial message. “I wish I might say it was easy, but no. We wanted to find families that felt comfortable and understood the purpose of this. These were very honest and vulnerable, ”he told the same aforementioned medium.
According to his story, what he considers most exciting in his career is being able to transmit stories with which the public identifies: “Part of the beauty of this movie is seeing someone else go through it and realizing that it’s much more common.”.
Beyond wanting to make this reality visible, considering that it is a current problem in the US, the filmmaker made this project because it is a subject that he observed from a young age. Although he was never a translator for his parents, he did observe how other children did it on a daily basis. Growing up in Lansing, Michigan, where his parents ran a grocery business and a Mexican restaurant, he witnessed how this phenomenon was more common than previously thought.
“We were in the center of this small Mexican community in Lansing. It was a place where Spanish, English and Spanglish were freely spoken. It was the kind of place where people would gather from time to time, ”he explained. Besides, he recalled how many people went to his parents’ establishment to ask them for help with translations to carry out different procedures: “And this was when I was young. That was my first impression of what equality means and the barriers that are placed on certain people who have language difficulties.”
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