This year’s 35th annual Florida Film Festival gets underway April 10th at the Enzian Theater with more than 160 movies on offer, originating from around the globe and in our backyard.
Among the Central Florida-based filmmakers tapped for the Oscar-qualifying festival are two documentarians looking at larger issues through a local lens and telling stories using very different approaches.
As it happens, the two are film students at University of Central Florida. But Guatemalan American filmmaker Alex Guerra’s film already has a list of festivals under his belt. His film is called My Grandma Still Cleans My Uncle's Room (Mi Mamita Todavía Mantiene el Cuarto de Mi Tío). It’s an experimental documentary following Guerra’s uncle’s journey through the American system as an undocumented immigrant and his experiences of home that live on in his childhood bedroom.
Syrian-born, Orlando-based Modar Kajo’s documentary, his first, is called “In God’s Hands.” It examines the presence of religion in shared public spaces by following the Osceola County School Board through debates over whether to allow chaplains to volunteer in its schools. It was spurred by a 2024 Florida law that authorizes public schools to allow these volunteer chaplains on school campuses, with the goal of providing students with additional counseling support. Each school district decides the role of chaplains in their schools, and which faith traditions qualify.
Exploring the now
“I was following Osceola County as they were voting on this, because they did a number of votes, and it got a bit contentious at points,” said Kajo. “One school board member was really pushing for this, and I had him on my documentary, while most of the other members were kind of against it. So, this is something that dragged on for months, and you had many members of the public who had strong opinions on this. So it was interesting to follow and to see how was that unfolding.”
As for Guerra, his film focuses on one man’s journey as an undocumented immigrant in the US, but he’s not alone in his experiences. “I guess the inspiration was this handmade wallet that my uncle made while he was in a migrant detention about ten years ago, and that wallet was given to me when he had gone back to Guatemala, by my grandmother when she was cleaning out his room,” Guerra said.
It’s an unassuming wallet, Guerra explained, made from snack and candy wrappers, “and yet, I think it's so symbolic of this whole journey. I spoke with him about that experience…memory reconstruction is a big part of it. Like, what does he remember from that home ten years [later], what has been left in his place in those past 10 years? And then also about his experience being in a migrant detention facility which he was held in for about three months, and in a way that handmade wallet kind of ties those, those two sides together.”
Looking forward, looking back
Both Guerra and Kajo document the current moment, and consider the question of what audiences of the future will learn from watching their films.
“I [hope] people remember that immigrants are more than just a statistic on a report or a number or a bill, but they have backgrounds and they come from places, and that the things that we do to enforce immigration in this country affect real people,” said Guerra.
Added Kajo, “In many ways, this feels like a critical moment when you're talking about the protections provided by the First Amendment, for example, both in terms of separation of church and state, and also other areas of public policy in the US. So I think people, I mean, depending on how things go in 2026, years from now people might wonder what people back in this day did to speak out, maybe, or to keep those protections intact?”
