Organizer Audrey Peral and son, Francisco, while canvassing in East Las Vegas, Nevada in 2020.
About the Event
Wednesday, Oct. 30, North Gate Hall, UC Berkeley
Reception: 5:00 pm
Screening: 6:00 pm
Panel: 7:00 pm
The just-released documentary “Voces: Latino Vote 2024” — produced and directed by Bernardo Ruíz and produced by award-winning documentary filmmaker Andrés Cediel (’04) and Marcia Robiou — takes a deep dive into the powerful and complicated Latino voting bloc across multiple states.
A screening will be followed by a Q&A with Mike Madrid, Senior Political Advisor at New California Coalition and Dr. Pablo Gonzalez, faculty, Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley.
About the film:
“This is the year that Latinos are actually going to make a big difference,” said Cediel, a UC Berkeley Journalism professor, who said the film highlights how Latino voters could affect the presidential elections as well as state and local races.
Cediel says the film explores how Latinos now have substantial enough numbers, with some 17.5 million voters nationally, to influence battleground states — not just states like California or Texas that already tend to vote bl
ue and red. He says the documentary “unpacks” the rising trend of Latinos skewing more conservative and likely to vote Republican and reveals some surprising voting impulses along gender and age lines.
The film builds on Ruíz’s 2020 ITVS film, Latino Vote: Dispatches from the Battleground that documented how Latinos were then poised to be the largest voting bloc in the electorate.
Bernardo Ruiz (Director/Producer) is an award-winning documentary producer and director based in New York. Ruiz has directed and produced both documentary films and series for a wide variety of outlets including ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, numerous PBS series as well as Disney+. Highlights of past directing work include Roberto Clemente for AMERICAN EXPERIENCE, which won the Alma award for outstanding made for television documentary. He also directed the feature documentaries Reportero, about Mexican reporters covering organized crime and political corruption in Tijuana and the Participant-financed Kingdom of Shadows, about the U.S.-Mexico drug war. Both films were nominated for News &
Documentary Emmy’s. Ruiz also directed the James Beard-nominated Harvest Season, about the lives of the temporary laborers, permanent residents, and multigenerational Latinos intimately connected to the production of premium wines in the Napa and Sonoma regions of Northern California. In 2020, Ruiz created, directed and produced Latino Vote: Dispatches from the Battleground, which was filmed during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Andrés Cediel is an Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker, and professor at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He has been a frequent contributor the PBS program FRONTLINE, including serving as a writer, director and producer of “Covid’s Hidden Toll” (2020), “Trafficked in America” (2018), and the Emmy-award winning piece “Kids Caught in the Crackdown” (2019) which was produced in collaboration with the Associated Press. For FRONTLINE, he also produced “Rape in the Fields” (2013) and was a writer and producer of “Rape on the Night Shift”(2015), which investigated the rampant sexual assault of immigrant women at work, and sparked legislative reform in California. The two films, which aired in both English and Spanish, were produced at the Investigative Reporting Program in collaboration with Univisión, the Center for Investigative Reporting and KQED. He also produced The Real CSI (2012) in collaboration with ProPublica, which examined flaws in forensic science. Cediel is currently developing a film with the Jingle Dress Project, which promotes art as healing while raising awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.
Marcia Maritza Robiou is a documentary filmmaker and investigative reporter. She was FRONTLINE’s 2022 Hollyhock Filmmaker-in-Residence and worked on a documentary about the Minneapolis Police Department, Police on Trial. She worked on Whose Vote Counts , the recipient of the 2020 Peabody Awardand 2020 NABJ Award , as a senior reporter and field producer. Marcia’s previous projects include Right to Fail, the winner of a Deadline Club Award , and Separated: Children at the Border , which garnered the 2018 Peabody Award and a 2018 Emmy-nomination for Outstanding Politics and Government Documentary . Marcia came to FRONTLINE as an Abrams Journalism Fellow in 2018. Before she became a filmmaker, she worked as a humanitarian for nearly a decade in Myanmar, South Sudan, Kenya and Iraq. During this time, Marcia worked on a number of shorts, including The Jungle Surgeon of Myanmar for Al Jazeera Witness. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Marcia was born in the U.S. to Dominican parents.