Pepe Vargas grew up in a small town outside Bogota, Colombia, studied law in Argentina, and worked as a university professor of economics and international law in Mexico before immigrating to the United States in 1979, ready for something new and eager to learn English. What he found was a country that differed greatly from what he’d expected. “I saw poverty, misery, starvation, violence. Not the image I had had from films and magazines.”
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Vargas was already 30 years old, yet he knew he was starting from scratch. Once he learned to speak English, he began taking classes in video, film, and television production at Columbia College. After graduating in 1986, he made a documentary about poverty in the United States called The Other Side of the Coin. He traveled to Boston, Los Angeles, and several other cities, interviewing the homeless, the unemployed, and those who were otherwise down-and-out. “The public schools in the inner cities were worse than jails,” he says. “And I could not believe the type of social services, like public health in Cook County, that were provided to the poor in the richest land.” He says he wanted to shatter the myth that everyone was equal in the United States. The documentary was intended, in part, as a warning to would-be immigrants–“It said, this is what awaits you.”
The following year, the festival was better organized and made money. “We had a screen and we projected 19 films. The attendance grew from 500 people to about 3,500. I was able to turn in about $4,000 in revenues.”
The 13th Chicago Latino Film Festival runs April 4 through 14, with screenings at Chestnut Station, 830 N. Clark, and Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets for individual screenings cost $7.50, $6.50 for students and seniors; festival passes are available for $70. Juan Carlos Desanzo’s Eva Peron: The True Story opens the festival this Friday night at 8 PM in the Art Institute’s Rubloff Auditorium; a buffet and cocktail reception begins at 5:30. Opening night tickets cost $60, $20 for the film only. For more information on the festival, check out the Section Two movie listings or call 312-431-1330.
