Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month Through a Streaming Lens

The Libraries provides access to thousands of streaming films to the Duke community, through multiple platforms. For Hispanic Heritage Month this year, take a look at our newest offering: PROJECTR. Projectr curates an ever-expanding collection of acclaimed movies, archival restorations, award-winning documentaries and artist-made works from around the world. Projectr offers over a hundred works exploring the Latinx and Latin American experience. You can browse this rich collection by Subject or Country, and get recommendations from independent filmmakers.

Here is a small selection that Projectr presents, with descriptions they provide. Explore and enjoy!

Fruits of Labor (dir. Emily Cohen Ibañez)
A Mexican-American teenage farmworker dreams of graduating high school when ICE raids in her community threaten to separate her family and force her to become her family’s breadwinner. Fruits of Labor is a lyrical, coming-of-age documentary about adolescence, nature, and how ancestors paved the way for us.

La Flor (dir. Mariano Llinás)
La Flor is an eight-part film, a decade in the making. It is an epic adventure in scale and imagination, a wildly entertaining ode to the power of storytelling. Filmed around the world, it is composed of six distinct episodes over eight parts, each starting the same four actresses. It redefines the concept of binge viewing.

Dry Ground Burning (dirs. Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós)

An electrifying portrait of Brazil’s dystopian contemporary moment that blends documentary with narrative fiction and genre elements. “A politically incendiary ethnographic sci-fi…In Dry Ground Burning, the future isn’t just female: it is Black, lesbian, profoundly matriarchal.” —Sight and Sound

A River Below (dir. Mark Grieco)
A captivating documentary about the ethics of activism in the modern media age. A River Below examines the efforts of two conservationists in the Amazon. One is a marine biologist and the other an animal activist and host of a popular National Geographic t.v. show. Their methods to save the pink river dolphin from extinction triggers unforeseen consequences.

Cuatro Paredes (dir. Matt Porterfield)
A luminous short film by Matt Porterfield (SOLLERS POINT, PUTTY HILL) featuring rising star Barbara Lopez, CUATRO PAREDES follows Karla, recently arrived in Tijuana, Mexico to stay at her estranged aunt’s house a year after her father’s death. In this moment of solitude and calm, she looks up, down, inward and outward through the transpositional alchemy of text and is reminded that speaking to oneself feels like a vital human practice.