Thursday, January 27, 2000
'Americanos' project more than just a film
BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
PARK CITY, Utah — Americanos: Latino Life in the United States is more than a documentary in competition at the Sundance Film Festival this year.
It is also a book, a musical composition, a feature at the Smithsonian Institutions and a traveling exhibit booked to criss-cross the United States for the next 10 years.
All those projects were spearheaded by Edward James Olmos, the actor-director-producer who was greeted with cheers and whistles after a series of screenings of Americanos at the festival this week.
Mr. Olmos said the project was conceived as a way of educating the United States about its fastest-growing ethnic group. “If I was English-only and sitting in this audience, I would think, "Oh, I get it.' ”
The Americanos traveling exhibition is now at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis (317-636-9378), one of its first stops, Mr. Olmos said. “Los Angeles won't get it until the year 2001. They were slow.”
When a member of the audience asked why he had not chosen Latino filmmakers to direct Americanos, Mr. Olmos said he chose the husband-and-wife documentary team of Susan Todd (a Wyoming native) and Andrew Young because he has collaborated with them, or with Mr. Young's filmmaker father, Robert Young, for decades, and because he respects their “aesthetic values.”
Through their Archipelago Films, the couple have won several awards at Sundance in the past; their documentary Madagascar: A World Apart won two Emmys; and they shared an Oscar nomination in 1994 for Children of Fate.
“They were our first choice and they will be our first choice in dealing with this kind of matter,” Mr. Olmos said. “I have been part of this family for 27, 28 years.”
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