Community Media Access Collaborative (CMAC) hosted an event for its members who tackled Fresno’s community social and political issues through short films last Sunday, March 1, 2020, at the Maya Cinemas.
CMAC is a member-based, nonprofit organization, which was created for people to better connect with media through the use of media. According to its website, its mission is to empower voices in the community to promote awareness, understanding, dialogue and civic engagement by providing media resources, access to training and media literacy.
The free event was open to the public for people to come watch local students showcase their films.
The event was put on in hopes to increase health outcomes of youth through video arts.
With a culmination of months of planning, producing, filming and editing by inaugural Youth Voices cohort, the event was put on by Kyle Lowe, training coordinator, who partnered with The California Endowment, Youth Leadership Institute and Maya Cinemas.
The first film of the event, “Home For All,” was a six-minute film written by 19 year old Raymart Catacutan.
“The film is about the work that a lot of people have been doing for the past 10 to 20 years to help individuals in the community but how we ended up in the situation that we are today,” Catacutan said. “The past couple of years that has been based on the Fresno City Council and affected the everyday lives of the homeless community.”
Catacutan explained that for him, the biggest part of the process was scheduling everything to be prepared and how he wanted it to be. The draft was easy for him, but when it came to details of his film, he wanted to make sure he told it with accuracy.
“I just wanted experience at first and was just going to be part of someone’s team, but Lowe convinced me to do something I was passionate about, so I brought up homeless resources,” said Catacutan.
Catacutan works with a lot of homeless individuals in his day-to-day life in between attending Fresno City College, working in Tower District and living in southeast Fresno.
“Seeing homeless [people] is just an everyday thing for me. When we hear the statistics that Fresno has the highest homeless rate in California, a lot that disregard comes from the work that members are doing,” said Catacutan. “I really wanted to highlight the good that Fresno is doing, not just the bad.”
Ruben Diaz, 17, also created a six-minute film called “Candies Tolteca,” which highlighted key points of immigration and media stereotypes that block the ability for society to see the success of immigrants happening right in front of them.
“My film is about immigration, because whenever you see the news, you see an immigrant robbed this [place] or shot this [person], and yeah there are people who do that, but it doesn’t represent all of us,” Diaz said. “There are people that are just solely based on that. You can point out a whole bunch of other great things, but unfortunately those stories just don’t make it into the news.”
Diaz decided to interview Aaron Ordaz, owner of Pops Emporium, Colosos Paleteria Y Neveria and Bocca Taqueria, for his film, to showcase the immigrants who created job opportunities and business in the U.S.
“I chose him specifically, but I can go to the street and grab anyone, because most immigrants there are law abiding because they have a lot of things going against them,” Diaz said. “You get arrested? That’s a great chance for immigration to walk in and say let me introduce you to the door.”
While Ordaz did provide pictures for the film, Diaz wanted to cover where he came from. Therefore, he filled that in by adapting his film into an animation. Ordaz wanted to remind people that Mexico is “just a regular city.”
Gabrielle Rivas, 23, and Johnsen Del Rosoral, program coordinator for the youthship institute, together worked on their 12-minute film, “Intergeneration Politics in Fresno,” which required them to do a lot of research in finding different age groups and asking them about their political views in certain subjects.
The two used video blogs and different experiences that they both had in Fresno. They were able to relate a lot of the topics discussed to some events such as the Fresno’s Women March and March For Our Lives, national issues that they could localize.
“We wanted to talk about local and national issues, we really wanted to highlight and focus the diversity of Fresno and how every person has a unique perspective on certain topics and how different age groups also have different ideas,” said Rivas.
Rivas and Rosoral have been working on the project for seven months as it took a while for them to collect surveys and gather data on people’s viewpoints.
“Really honing in on the person’s main idea was really difficult because people have so many great opinions, but you don’t want to take their opinions out of context,” said Rivas.
CMAC started the events with its members by doing weekly meetings. It continued to check in on the projects.
“The company was hands-on with the creation of their concepts and helped them find interviews, assist in how to use video equipment, and editing,” said Rivas. “They helped with a lot of different things that we wouldn’t know how to do, but they also gave us a lot of room for creativity.”
For more information about CMAC or future events, contact Lowe at [email protected].