Naomi Uman, United States, 2003, 47:00, English and Spanish with subtitles

Mala Leche (2003) is the sequel to Leche (1998), an experimental black-and-white documentary on the life of a dairy farm family in Central Mexico. Filmed five years later, Mala Leche follows the same family after they migrated to California’s agricultural Central Valley. Through economic struggles and familial growing pains, the family relies on traditional values to navigate a complex environment of immigrant working life and cultural alienation. 

Naomi Uman is an American-born filmmaker, visual artist, currently living in Mexico City. Uman received an MFA in Filmmaking from CalArts in 1998. Uman’s work is often “marked by her signature handmade aesthetic, often shooting, hand-processing and editing her films with the most rudimentary of practices.” Her award-winning films have screened widely at major international festivals as well as the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.

Carla Astorga, Mexico/United States, 2026, 63:46, English and Spanish with subtitles

Polaris examines the real case of the Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project created in 2009 by the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater. Designed for basic cell phones, it combined poetry and survival data for migrants in the Mexico–U.S. desert. Its criminalization reveals how art can become a political threat, while the experience of Toshiro, a street vendor in Tijuana, anchors the conflict in the everyday life of the border crossing. 

Carla Astorga is a Chilean filmmaker and documentarian, a graduate of the Chilean School of Cinema. Her work explores global resistance, activism, and technology, shaped by her fieldwork with Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. She has completed her first feature-length documentary, Polaris, which explores the intersection of technology and migration, and is currently pursuing its international distribution. She is developing her second feature-length documentary, POGO: Tickets to Hell, which explores the life and legacy of one of the founders of punk in Chile. She is also working on Power to the Network, a documentary exploring the history of hacktivism.

Elizabeth Sisco, Louis Hock, David Avalos, United States, 1993, 13:55, English and Spanish with subtitles

Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso (AR/AR) was conceived as a series of symbolic social and economic transactions between three artists and hundreds of Mexican and Central American unauthorized, immigrant laborers. The artists converted the $5000 commission from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (made possible in part by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, i.e., federal tax dollars) to cash as signed $10 bills and distributed them as rebates/reembolsos to a segment of the tax-paying population that suffers from taxation without representation. Integral to the project was the media witnessing the trade of artist-signed currency for receipts signed by undocumented taxpayers. During the three months of street performances, an evolving media campaign promoted discussion of the relationship between citizens and undocumented workers in San Diego County's underground economy.

Elizabeth Sisco (born 1954 in Cheverly, Maryland) is an American artist associated with the Chicano art movement, based in San Diego. Her work examines  immigration, tourism, and citizenship, particularly about the Chicano experience in the United States and life on the border between San Diego and California. Louis Hock (born 1948 in Los Angeles) is an artist and independent filmmaker whose work spans film, video, installation and interventions in public space. His work explores immigration, border politics, and social inequality through documentary and experimental media. Hock currently holds the title of Professor Emeritus at University of California, San Diego. David Avalos (born in San Diego, 1947-2025) made confrontational and philosophical works that engaged in the Chicano art movement. His work focused on issues of local communities, mixed-race identity, and public/private divisions. Avalos was an artist, activist, and educator at University of California-San Marcos. Together, the three artists have collaborated on public art projects, including Welcome to America’s Finest Tourist Plantation (1988) and Art Rebate/Arte Reembolso (1993).

Omar Pimienta, Mexico/United States, 2026, 6:00, Spanish with subtitles

Puente México traces the history of the first concrete bridge built across the Tijuana River, using its construction and eventual destruction as a starting point to explore shifting relationships between infrastructure, landscape, and memory. Through poetry, archival photographs, and found footage, the video follows a territory marked by repeated cycles of construction and erasure. Rather than just channeling the river’s flow, concrete and sediment register overlapping temporalities, forms that endure, shift, and erode. These transformations also shape the lives of those who have sought to inhabit the riverbanks, tracing histories of eviction, displacement, resettlement, and the emergence of new neighborhoods across Tijuana. 

Omar Pimienta is a poet, visual artist, and scholar from Tijuana whose interdisciplinary practice explores memory, migration, and landscape across the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. Moving between poetry, photography, video, and installation, his work draws on personal and collective histories to examine how borders shape lived experience. His recent projects engage the Tijuana River as a space of material and symbolic transformation. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he directs the Transborder Culture Laboratory.