Official Selections: Latinx Film Festival
Congratulations to our accepted filmmakers!
Films are listed in alphabetical order, index to the left.
Scroll Down to learn more about each film
Jesse Trevino: The Artist. The Man.
Feature
An amazing, true story of a legendary San Antonio artist, who lost hist painting and drawing hand in combat in Vietnam, but at the urging of a fellow amputee, taught himself to paint with his left hand.
Then, despite constant pain, undiagnosed PTSD, and many personal problems, he pushed himself to become San Antonio’s best-known and most-beloved artist, with works in the Smithsonian and huge tile murals that are now city landmarks, one of them nine stories tall on a downtown hospital overlooking a historic park. He also overcame poverty and discrimination, born into a family of 12 children in Mexico, then raised on San Antonio’s poor West Side. But after winning an art contest in grade school at a local museum, the child prodigy set his sights on getting his work in museums permanently and won a scholarship to the prestigious Art Students League of New York.
Drafted a few months later, he could have avoided military service because he was born in Mexico. But like others in his big family, he chose to serve his adopted country. But he was ambushed three months into his tour of duty, a booby trap and a sniper’s bullet nearly killed him, shattering his right leg and severing nerves to his right hand, which would lead to amputation.
Years later, after four wives, five children, and constant battles with those he loved the most, he beat stage four throat cancer, and as he was finally feeling up to new challenges and more murals, another cancerous tumor in his face led to a very risky surgery.
Director: Randy Beamer
Writer: Randy Beamer
Producer: Randy Beamer
Key Cast: Jesse Trevino "himself"
Cinematographer: Randy Beamer
Lucia & Nicole
Short
World Premiere
Shot on 16mm film, ‘Lucia & Nicole’ is a queer short film about two girlhood friends who find each other again on the cusp of adulthood. When Lucia and her mother find Nicole living on the streets after she’s come out, Lucia’s family decides to do what they can to help her out. However, Nicole’s re-appearance into their lives raises questions about their own daughter’s identity and how to respond to Lucia and Nicole’s reconnection.
Director: Marlene Emilia Rios
Producer: Marlene Emilia Rios, Aroonsri Khamsamran, Sam Gordon, Garrett Smith
Writer: Marlene Emilia Rios
Cast: Romance Suarez, Claudia Levis, Lisette Nichols, David Arturo Sánchez
Cinematographer: Garrett Smith
Editor: Marlene Emilia Rios
Winner, Best Short Film, Wildsound Feedback Film Festival, 2025
Winner, Best New Mexico Short (Platinum), Mindfield Film Festival, Jan-Feb 2025
Lucia & Nicole is about being embraced—by family, by community, by the people who choose you when it matters most. I made this film thinking about the stories I grew up hearing from my grandparents, and the kinds of romances I saw in films like A Walk in the Clouds or Pride & Prejudice. But as I got older, I realized how rarely those stories were told through a queer lens.
I wanted to create something that felt like a memory—soft, romantic, but still grounded in a world we know. We shot on 16mm to give it that sense of warmth and nostalgia, and to honor the beauty and grit of Albuquerque, a city that’s always felt like it’s celebrating a fluid identity.
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