Screening and Q&A: Bx3M a Film by Judith Escalona
BxArts Factory in Partnership with The Bronx Filmmakers present the Screening of Bx3M with a special presentation of the short film Isa: A Brief Portrait
This is a FREE screening but RSVP is required. Please reserve your ticket here: www.bx3mfilmscreening.eventbrite.com
Bx3M a film by Judith Escalona
Things are heating up as Maria, Mona and Michael get ready for their senior year at James Monroe High School in the Bronx. Graduation is a no-brainer for Maria, a natural-born nerd who is top in her class. Mona, her best friend, wants to go to Cooper Union and that spells trouble for the aspiring photographer. Michael, Maria’s boyfriend, is flunking out. No matter, Michael is on a mission yet unknown to him — call it destiny or revenge.
Bx3M traces the lives of three teenage friends growing up in a poor, working-class neighborhood. Maria loves Michael more than anything in the world but that love is blind. Her father knows it, Maria will have to see for herself then come to a very hard decision. Mona feels trapped in a lover’s triangle, wavering between Seneca, a Monroe track star, and Sam, a Cooper Union student. Her crisis is a well-kept secret till her mother finds out Sam is a girl. Michael’s mother was gunned down by drug-dealers when he was three years old and his father never did anything about it. That stings even now, 14 years later. Michael refuses to be like him. When his best friend Pus-head gets pushed out of a window and dies, Michael goes after Duke, the local drug pusher –Pus-head’s killer.
“It’s an epic on a city block,” says Judith Escalona, the director and writer of Bx3M. She grew up in the Bronx and knows these characters intimately as friends, neighbors or the subjects of gossip. Genuine experiences inform the lives of Maria, Mona, and Michael, the fictional characters Escalona has created. Portraying the lives of inner city girls sets this urban drama apart from most films of the genre. These portraits of Latina adolescents are memorably different, yet their struggle is universal. Michael’s story, too, draws on the conventions used to represent ghetto life but with unique and unpredictable moments.
Isa: A Brief Portrait a short film by Álvaro Franco
Summary: A queer woman of color commutes to school while trying to conceal the fact that she is homeless. (5 minutes, 2014)
