Angie Reza Tures
“What began as a celebration turned into a movement.” That’s how Angie describes Femme Frontera, a collective of six women filmmakers, which she founded to counter disinformation about the border region by centering narratives told from the perspectives of womxn-identifying filmmakers. The first annual showcase premiered in August 2016, and has grown since then to reach beyond their own U.S.-México border, encompassing films from womxn around the world confronting a multitude of borders.
Though she re-located from her hometown of El Paso to the San Francisco Bay Area to study film, she was pulled back to the region, where her art has exponentially grown ever since. The natural environment of El Paso — the mountain range home to a diverse array of plants, the singular smell of the rain, the particular way the remaining light shines in the evening — is a character all its own in her work, and she’s uniquely able to illuminate these intimate movements and moments in her art-making. The gentle realities of the physical environment are so often smoothed over to make room for militarized claims of this space in dominant discourse. Angie’s work, then, returns this sense of vitality, and makes an undeniable assertion of presence in the border region.
Angie critiques U.S. border imperialism with the same weight that she provides an intimate account of her father’s life and influence in My Father, a Beautiful Animal (2012). Her filmmaking defies easy categorization, and is perhaps best defined as carrying these threads of narrative that help us arrive at a more complex and expansive understanding of life along the border.
Learn more about Angie in her own words: “Filmmaker and documentary film instructor Angie Reza Tures, received her B.A. in Media Studies with a minor in Music from the University of San Francisco in 2003. For nine years, she worked as an independent filmmaker, producer, and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area studying under and working with award-winning filmmakers such as Sam Green (Oscar-nominated The Weather Underground), Tiffany Shlain (Sundance-winner Connected) and Carlos Bolado (Like Water for Chocolate). In October 2011, she relocated to her hometown of El Paso, TX where she currently teaches documentary filmmaking to youth with the support of the Community Arts Program grant, awarded by the City of El Paso Museums and Cultural Affairs Department. In April 2012, her documentary short film, My Father, A Beautiful Animal, won Best Film Made by an Adult at the San Francisco WritersCorps Poetry Projection Project Film Festival. Her latest short, Memory Box, has been selected to screen at the EQUUS Film Festival in New York City in November 2016. In 2016, she founded the Femme Frontera Filmmaker Showcase. Its premiere on August 1st, 2016, exhibited short films directed by six female filmmakers from El Paso, Texas, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. The films provided personal and unique perspectives about the border communities they represent. As a result of a successful run in El Paso, the Showcase is now touring other cities and will become a yearly event showcasing films made by filmmakers from the border region.”
Watch Angie’s remarkable film, Memory Box, below:
