Weaving the Past: Journey of Discovery won 3 honors from the 2016 Chicago Amarcord Arthouse Film Festival in the following 3 categories:

• Winner, Documentary
• Official Selection, Documentary
• Honorable Mention, Documentary

About the Amarcord Arthouse Film Festival:

The AMARCORD ARTHOUSE TELEVISION & VIDEO FEST AWARDS (AATVF) is a web-only semiannual competition with the focus on arthouse films made primarily for television and video.

ATVF is a division of Blow-up Arthouse Film festival. The festival links the most creative artists together with very intelligent audiences for its annual festival of narrative, musical and documentary films, shorts, animations, experimental films, and student work. The Festival was named after the Fellini’s iconic film “Amarcord”.

We believe that a story driven by a genuine expression can stimulate new thoughts that have the power to promote the fundamental principles of humanism, expand creative frontiers, stimulate new levels of compassion, and even lead to social change. We would like to see films made primarily for aesthetic and philosophical reasons.

The Festival is an organization devoted to the discovery and of arthouse filmmakers and audiences. The Festival pursues goals to support, and inspire film and theatre artists from the United States and around the world, and to introduce audiences to their new creation. We also welcome established Arthouse filmmakers, who already attained a major contribution to the art of filmmaking.

Thank you Amarcord Arthouse Film Festival for such wonderful recognition!
Amarcord Arthouse TV Fest

• Official Selection, Documentary
• Official Selection, Screenplay

Thank you Depth of Field Film Festival!
dofiff.com

• Award of Exceptional Merit, Direction
• Award of Exceptional Merit, Editing
• Award of Merit, Human Spirit Feature
• Award of Merit, Viewer Impact / Content
• Kudos Endeavor Award, Narration Talent

That’s an impressive list.  Thank you, Docs Without Borders!

“Docs Without Borders Film Festival (DWBFF) is a festival dedicated to DOCUMENTARIES and DOCU-DRAMAS . . . DWBFF is run as a web-based competition, instead of a traditional film festival: 100% of our effort and investment goes into finding a market for you, not into renting theatres unless it is dictated by the distributors to further test the market.”

To find out more about the Docs Without Borders Film Festival, visit their official site or find them on facebook or twitter.

VIDEO SLIDE SHOW AND SOUNDTRACK (with soprano soloist Maria Viola Hernández Camargo, El Coro latino de Los Angeles, and The Angel City Orchestra):

ABOUT MARIA VIOLA: Noted soprano soloist, dedicated social worker and beloved matriarch to an extended family, Maria Viola Hernández Camargo (professionally known as Maria Villafañe) passed on Sunday morning, December 20, 2015, in Altadena, California. She was 92. Surrounded by her children and grandchildren, and guarded by her beloved, loyal dog “Tito,” Maria Viola died peacefully in her home with its gardens and flowers that she loved so much.

Maria Viola was the only daughter of Reverend Emilio N. Hernández Malacara and Fausta Camargo Durán, both Mexican-born advocates and fighters for social justice. A child-worker at the hacienda, Los Altos de Ibarra, in Guanajuato, Mexico, Emilio was befriended and mentored there by anarchist revolutionary Práxedis G. Guerrero. Prax and Emilio fled Porfirio Díaz’s persecution and continued their revolutionary activities in the Southwest of the United States. There they became active and close associates with members of the Partido liberal mexicano (PLM), including Ricardo Flores Magón. Later, transforming into a pioneering Methodist pastor ministering to Latino immigrants in the U.S., Emilio met Doña Fausta and they married in 1921. Fausta was as courageous as Emilio in confronting injustice. As a girl in Chihuahua, she fought her way into General Pancho Villa’s camp and confronted Villa in order to bargain with him to spare the life of elderly father, Don Cristóbal Camargo, who Villa had taken captive to hang as an example, because Don Cristóbal was a landowner. Villa, though, was impressed by her valor and he agreed to Fausta’s offer to turn over to his soldaderas all of her family’s goods, foods and livestock, and burn down the family’s rancho herself, in exchange for her father.

Maria Viola was born to these fearless people in Long Beach, California on September 21, 1923. Maria Viola or “Violet” (Violeta) grew up along with her late brothers, Hubert Camargo, and Oscar and Mitchell Hernandez, in a family dedicated to Christian spirituality, social justice, serving their communities and helping others. Maria Viola’s parents encouraged the musical and artistic development of children in every church and mission they led, and this included their own children. Along with her brothers, Maria Viola served God through music from early childhood. Whether out in the fields of California’s Central Valley as a three year old singing hymns for Mexican agricultural workers, or singing solos in the great cathedrals of Europe as an adult, Maria’s crystalline and angelic voice captured the hearts and elevated the spirits of all who heard her sing. Her father made sure she received operatic voice training from some of the world’s best teachers and vocal coaches, including famed former Metropolitan Opera bass Andrés de Segurola teaching in Hollywood, Russian-born soprano Sonia Verbitsky at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, and bel canto singer and teacher Gertrude Darsie in Pasadena, California.

Soon after World War II ended, Maria met the love of her life Roberto A. Domínguez Díaz, a handsome Puerto Rican-born U.S. Army veteran whose kindness, helpfulness, charm and exquisite manners are still fondly remembered. Their wedding in Santa Paula, California in 1946 began a felicitous 59-year marriage that produced three children, Walter, Yvonne and Yolanda, and seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Maria’s beloved Robert passed in 2005. With a commanding presence and powerful voice that was suited to grand opera, Maria weighed pursuing that career, but soon she felt her destiny was with her family, serving the community and praising God through her exceptional voice. From the 1940s through the 1980s, Maria gave operatic recitals to benefit churches, and arts and culture societies in Los Angeles, Pasadena and throughout the Southern California region. She was the featured soprano in Handel’s “Messiah” in annual performances by El Coro Latino, including at the Music Center in Los Angeles. She continued to sing as a soloist in choirs until 2012. She loved teaching voice to numerous young people in schools and individually.

Maria’s strong sense of social justice found most expression during her long career as a social worker in the Pasadena office of the California State Department of Rehabilitation. With her characteristic resoluteness and refusal to take “no” as an answer, Maria succeeded in helping countless firefighters, police officers, construction workers and many others get the help they needed to get back on their feet after devastating injuries and traumas. Despite demands of work, singing and family, Maria also made time to complete studies in Psychology and Music and receive a Bachelor’s Degree in 1980 from Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles.

Maria never forgot that her family’s origins were in Mexico, a country she had lived in and traveled through, and she adored it and its rich culture, especially its indigenous traditions, music and visual arts. Maria Viola was highlighted in the acclaimed 2014 feature documentary, “Weaving the Past: Journey of Discovery,” that detailed the epic journey to the U.S. of her Mexican-born parents, and a generation of Mexican immigrants and revolutionaries over one hundred years ago.

Maria is survived by her son, filmmaker Walter Robert Domínguez Hernández and her daughter-in-law, actress Shelley Morrison; her daughters Yvonne Marie Domínguez Hernández and Yolanda Patricia Domínguez Hernández; grandchildren Heather Gibson Domínguez, Margaux Gibson Domínguez, Cory Green Domínguez, Lacy Green Domínguez, and Jenna Green Domínguez, Robert McCreary Domínguez and Miranda (Missy) McCreary Domínguez. A funeral and burial was held on Tuesday, January 5 at Church of the Hills in Forest Lawn ~ Hollywood Hills cemetery in Los Angeles. The service was officiated by Bishop Mary Ann Swenson, elder of the United Methodist Church. Maria Viola was a beautiful and inspirational woman who will be remembered and greatly missed by all her extended family, colleagues, friends and students. She is singing with the angels.

Through sound, Thomas creates an emotional foundation for Weaving the Past that invisibly guides the audience to “feel” the picture on screen. From hurried footsteps and distant echoing gunfire to something as simple as the buzzing of a fly these sounds create a world that exists outside the frame of the screen and really bring the viewer into the moment.

Weaving the Past Editor, Maria Honrado, shares some of the challenges of editing a film that has such a sweeping scope and was informed by so much source material. She also reveals how she grew connected to the people and the stories of Weaving the Past and why films like this are important to understanding the plight of immigrants.

Maria’s editorial agility in combining still images, super 8 film, standard and high definition video so seamlessly, becomes a character of it’s own that underlies a progressive and often magical sense of wonder as this sometimes tragic story unfolds. Originally from Spain, Maria’s involvement in the project is a blessing indeed as her background in graphic design enabled her to confidently create maps and animations for the film that evolved as the story did.

The first part of the interview is in English and the second part, in Spanish. A subtitled version of the Spanish portion is coming soon.

Michelle Mills of the Pasadena Star-News has published an article/review for Weaving the Past.
‘Weaving the Past’ follows a local man’s quest for family secrets – at Pasadena Star-News

Roberta Martinez of the blog “A Pasadena Latina” has posted a very nice piece about Walter and about Weaving the Past entitled “A Journey of Discovery.”

“Walter knew Tata as a man of kindness and strong religious conviction. How then to reconcile this beloved church elder with the man who in his youth had been an active part of the Mexican Revolution. His question was less how could this be? It was much more, how did this come to be? That sort of question is often is the most difficult to answer.”

Read the entire post at A Pasadena Latina

While there are many documentaries about people searching for meaning through their family’s past, what makes “Weaving the Past” so engrossing are Tata’s dramatic ties with Native Americans and Mexicans living in Mexico and US border states, in this case Texas and California. Mixing grainy archival black and white footage and old photographs with sometimes impressionistic re-enactments and more contemporary film clips, Dominguez confronts not only his personal history, but also California’s, illustrating how one charismatic person — Tata — can change the course of another person’s life.

Read the full article at Pasadena Weekly

On August 12, Executive Producer Shelley Morrison appeared on KLTA 5 News in Los Angeles.  Shelley shares beautiful thoughts about Robin Williams and discusses Weaving the Past ahead of its premiere engagement at the Laemmle Playhouse 7 in Pasadena. If you missed the original live broadcast, you can see the complete segment below.