As part of its month-long celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, NVCC hosted Guatemalan-American director and producer Luis Argueta September 24. NVCC’s Dean of Academic Affairs, Lisa Dresdner, Ph.D. welcomed Argueta for the special screening of his film Abrazos, which documents the transformational journey of a group of U.S. citizen children who travel from Minnesota to Guatemala to meet their grandparents for the first time. After being separated for nearly two decades, these families are able to share stories, strengthen traditions, and begin to reconstruct their cultural identity. While Abrazos is the story of 14 U.S. citizen children living with at least one undocumented parent, there are an estimated 4.5 million in the U.S in similar situations.

The film screening was sponsored by NVCC’s Hispanic Student Union and Office of Multicultural Affairs who were pleased to invite Argueta to share his work during his short visit to the U.S. The director had just screened his most recent work U-Turn at UConn and Yale. Following the screening, Argueta participated in an emotionally riveting and candid Q+A. Some of the most poignant comments came from students from Albania, Bangladesh, Colombia, and Rwanda who tearfully thanked the filmmaker for telling this story, which was indeed their story too, of painful family separations as a result of stringent immigration laws. The show stopper, however, was when a former NVCC student from Guatemala walked into the auditorium during the Q & A period with her elderly parents who looked much the same as those parents on the screen. They too had been separated years before. The audience gasped as the parents were introduced and embraced by both the filmmaker and NVCC’s ESL Coordinator and event moderator, Karlene Ball.

“I was moved not only by the film, but by the response of the students in the audience. I could hear audience members sobbing and see some wiping away tears as they watched. A strength of the film was its tender exploration of both the pain of family separation as a result of immigration laws, and the unspeakable joy of the embrace of one’s grandparents. Rarely have I experienced such a strong call to action,” said Ball.

Argueta’s film The Silence of Neto is the first Guatemalan film to earn international recognition and awards. The Guardian listed Mr. Argueta as one of Guatemala’s “National Living Icons,” alongside Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu and Singer/Songwriter Ricardo Arjona. Thanks to the support of a NVCC’s Max R. Traurig Library, a copy of the Abrazos DVD is now available to loan.