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Associate Professor Pedro Lange-Churion (left) consults with assistant director Sulma Miranda (right), during a shoot this summer of Churion’s film “Visitas.”
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USF Professors Turn Film Producers
Pedro Lange-Churion, associate professor of modern and classical languages, may teach Spanish literature but he has long wanted to see those stories come alive on screen. Now, he and two department colleagues, Tomas Crowder and Aranzazu Borrachero, are becoming catalysts for bringing Latin and South American lives to the movies as filmmakers and film festival producers.
This summer, Lange-Churion finished filming a three-part feature film in Bogotá, Colombia called “Visitas” about stories he wrote dramatizing the ways Colombia’s guerilla war has affected its culture. Part of his budget was funded by a USF faculty development grant. By March, he plans to release the film in South America.
“I think it’s going to be controversial because it deals with the makeup of Colombian society,” he said. One of the segments in the film is about a woman and her young daughter who are displaced by violence and must live under a bridge in the capitol, Bogotá. When the daughter dies, the mother must find a way to bury her. “There are three million people who have been displaced by the crossfire. You see them in plazas and roaming public parks but people in Bogotá have developed a thick skin toward these problems. This film wants to awaken people.”
“Visitas” is not the only film Lange-Churion made this summer. He also helped film a documentary, with Adjunct Professor Crowder and Assistant Professor Borrachero, about a film festival called Ciné Campesino the three produced in rural Honduras. Transporting projectors, screens, and sound equipment into the Honduran jungle, the team presented films about campesino, or rural, life and then filmed the audience reacting to it.
Lange-Churion said it is important to bring the films to marginalized populations who don’t normally see their stories told on the big screen. “It’s empowering because they come away from the films with a feeling of inclusion,” he said. “If the campesinos don’t see themselves, they are forced to ally themselves with a culture that is not theirs and that erodes their local culture.” The team plans to show their documentary and their film festival to other rural populations around southern Spain and Latin and South America to help support rural cultures.
This is only the beginning of what the three faculty hope will be a blossoming film department at USF. They have applied to the faculty curriculum committee to form a new film minor as early as next semester.
The timing couldn’t be better for Lange-Churion, who is already plunging ahead with a new script. “I always wanted to do film but I’ve been waiting for the right time,” he said.
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