Sabrina Avilés founded Boston’s only currently operating Latino film festival, CineFest Latino Boston, in 2021, during a time of personal crisis.

“I was in a kind of a very pivotal moment in my life at that point, and my father was very ill and close to dying,” Avilés, executive director of CineFest Latino Boston, told the Sampan recently. “And so it just made me reflect about a lot of things. When something like that happens, you just reflect about, you know, your life choices and moving on and how life is so precious and short. I think at that point, it was definitely a factor in kind of motivating me to move forward and start something that I could call my own.”

CineFest Latino Boston, which screens in the Boston area Sept. 25-Sept. 29, highlights stories by and about Latinos. The festival is committed to “using the power of film to break stereotypes, bring cultures and communities together and reveal the complex issues affecting the Latinx community in the United States, as well as communities in Latin America and Spain,” according to its website. 

Avilés expanded the definition a bit to add that the festival is a celebration, and it is intended to help educate audiences. 

When asked which stereotypes the festival helps debunk, she responded, “I think the biggest one now is just about who we are. As you know, we are either immigrants, or children and immigrants, or grandchildren of immigrants. We really contribute to this society in ways that often get taken for granted. Any negative image or perception that people have about us is exactly that … I think that what happens in the news nowadays and is that, and for people who don’t want to explore further than what they hear or read, you know, for certain people, it’s so easy to look at the world through a very black and white lens, because it’s easy to put things into those little boxes,” she said. 

“And I always argue and have argued that who we are, what the world is, policies, anything — nothing is truly black and white, and everything is gray. We’re not black and white. We’re not either/or, we’re complex. We’re diverse even within our communities. We all come from different countries. The majority of us have been colonized by Spain, but each country has its own nuances and languages and history.  I think for some people, that is too much information and that doesn’t fit into the black and white. You know, it’s comfortable to accept the black and white. The grays take effort. They require effort. They require conversation. They require research. And that might be too much for some people to even undertake. So, you know, I look at the festival as a way in which we can present the grays, have conversation around the grays.”

The festival is run entirely by volunteers and features dozens of narrative and documentary films in feature length as well as shorts. 

The festival features more documentary films, said Avilés, because they are more easily produced in the United States. 

“Film is really hard to obtain funding for, really hard.  We’ve been lucky. We have some wonderful, amazing, wonderful narrative films. I guess the takeaway is just the breadth and depth of the talent that we have in the United States and in Latin America. And that also a lot of the films that I also have programmed are films that truly elevates and amplifies the independent filmmaker, where you won’t see many films in my film festival that are 100% commercial, like something that would come out of Hollywood. There are things that are a little bit more commercial, if you will.

“And when I say commercial, it is a little bit easier to follow and engage with. And I think a lot of the films that we present, we have some experimental films that they’re very challenging to watch, but it’s like going to the museum. You see impressionist paintings, and most people are like, ‘oh, that’s so beautiful!’ And I love Monet, and I love Renoir, and it’s very easy on the palette, very easy to digest that. But then you go to the modern section, and you see Jackson Pollock, you see Joan Miró, you see all these, you see even Picasso in his cubist phase when he started to abstract his art, or anybody that even is beyond that, where you just question ‘what am I?’ ‘What am I seeing?’ 

But I had an art history teacher who used to tell me, ‘you don’t have to analyze it, just feel it. Good art will make you react.’  So, film is about that. You’ll either love it or you’ll hate it, but it won’t leave anybody neutral.” 

Avilés explained that watching a film takes apatience because sometimes the payoff doesn’t come until the end. She compared Hollywood films to fast food because five minutes into those films the audience already knows who the protagonists and antagonists are and what the outcome will be. The films that are being presented at CineFest require the audience to wait to be satisfied and challenged emotionally and intellectually in the long run. 

All of the films in CineFest, she promised, have one constant and that is that they engage the audience on a human level which makes for good storytelling. 

The films are chosen for the festival in two ways, either through a call for submissions or by researching which Latino films are getting buzz at film festivals. CineFest reaches out to the distributors for those films and asks if they can showcase their films in the festival. The opening night film, “In the Summers,” had earlier success at Sundance, winning the Grand Jury Prize for Dramatic films and was directed by a Latina director, Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio, starring a famous Puerto Rican rapper, René Pérez. 

Avilés explained, “Starting this year, I was going to start a tradition where anywhere between two and four weeks before the initial run of the festival, I want to do a free screening at a Latino community because a lot of these venues, as beautiful as they are, they’re not in Latino neighborhoods.”

But the problem, she said, was of the scarcity of art house in those areas.

At the major theaters where they will be screened, however, she has another obstacle: “Because they’re not Latino neighborhoods, it’s hard for my community to come to these screenings. But at the same time, I have to think about honoring the work of the filmmakers that I programmed and show their films in really beautiful theaters.”

This year she was able to hold a free screening for the Latino community in Chelsea at the Apollinaire Theater.

“We converted it into sort of a projection room. And it was really successful. And because it was our first one, we had a little reception. We showed three shorts. And also, because a lot of these communities don’t even know that CineFest exists, it serves two purposes. One is a way to bring the festival to these communities and really to let people know the festival exists. You know, because we have our film festival once a year, but we have screenings all throughout the year in different locations. That’s a way to let people know that we exist, and also to feel a sense of pride and ownership towards the festival. I do the festival not only for white, general audiences. I do it for our community and it’s really important for me to engage them, especially the youth, because then they see possibilities, especially if they’re interested in entering production.”

The festival will be held at the Coolidge Corner Theater, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Emerson Paramount Theater from Sept. 25 to Sept. 29. There will be an opening night reception for sponsors and pass holders and a closing night reception that is open to the public at the Coolidge Corner Theater. The closing night event is where the award winners of the festival will be announced. For a schedule of film and events go to www.cinefestlatino.com.