When director Jasmin Mara López sees a photo of her niece with her grandfather, she is flooded by painful memories of her own childhood sexual abuse at his hands—and the following 24 years of her silence. Through archival family footage and intimate moments in the present, Silent Beauty confronts painful truths while revealing the beauty one can feel when they reach the other side of grief. Join us for a screening of this cinematically striking and poetic documentary and a revelatory conversation with Jasmin after the show.

This work-in-progress workshop by the Mexican Studies Research Collective will feature Tulane University Zemurray-Stone Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Olivia Cosentino, and Dustin Dill. Participants can register for the Zoom workshop. One week prior (3/2), attendees will receive Cosentino’s text, “Angélica María’s alegría: Stardom and Idealized Youth in 1960s Mexico,” part of her monograph-in-progress, Starscapes: Youth, Modernity, and Media in Mexico. Dr. Paul Julian Smith (CUNY) will respond before feedback and conversation open up to the audience.

As usual we are a sponsor of the NOFF this year and it’s a great lineup. The list of films being sponsored by the Stone Center and the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute is below. This year there are three ways to watch the festival: virtually, in-person, or both!

Join the Grant Center for the American Jewish Experience for a screening of Children of the Inquisition: Their Story Can Now Be Told. This documentary film takes the viewer on a journey unearthing 500 years of hidden history, following the families forced to convert to Catholicism or flee during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Through the discoveries of their families’ flights to safety, characters come to understand how their ancestors shaped history and how a perilous past shaped their identities.