Film Screening, Guest Film Curator Talk, and Q&A with Mary Leonard

Join us for a screening of the short film compilation, Sin Vergüenza, included in the exhibition Cultural Ties at Kennedy Heights Arts Center (part of the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial: The Long View), and the specially selected feature-length film Carmita. Guest Film Curator Mary Leonard will give an introduction to each of the films and lead a Q&A session with the audience afterward.

Sin Vergüenza is a group of film clips and videos featuring unabashed, uninhibited performances by Cuban and Puerto Rican female and female-identifying singers and dancers spanning the period from the 1950s through the present. All are confident performers who are unapologetically sexy and/or break gender norms. Early performers clad in revealing outfits stare at the camera as they shake what they’ve got. Singers are transported as they succumb to passion and ecstasy. Women stare lustfully at women. Women appropriate supposedly male musical genres. Women and men reinvent themselves and their public images, playing with gender codes. They are sometimes overtly sexual, sometimes bluntly political. They attract your gaze and stare right back. All the twenty first century films and music videos were directed by female filmmakers from the Caribbean.

Carmita is a complex portrait of a Cuban actress. At the beginning of the decade of the 1950s, Carmen Ignarra left Cuba with the intention of becoming a Hollywood star but, she recounts, her career was cut short by her controlling husband, the Mexican producer Santiago Reachi. Today, she survives, surrounded by her memories, in an old semi-abandoned mansion. However, as Laura Amelia cleans and restores the house and engages Carmita in conversation, a more complex psychological portrait is revealed.

This series is a presentation of Mary Leonard’s ongoing project, Caribbean Eye.

Content includes sexual language and pole dancing.

Free and open to the public. Get your FREE tickets now!

Two screenings available: September 12 and October 10

https://events.humanitix.com/film-screening-with-mary-leonard-september-12

https://events.humanitix.com/film-screening-with-mary-leonard-october-10

ACCESSIBILITY INFORMATION: Located at Kennedy Heights Arts Center Linder Annex, 6620 Montgomery Road. Our side has a big mural on it. The building is wheelchair accessible and has no stairs. Plenty of parking in our lot. Bathrooms are ADA. Seating is general admission. The film Carmita will have English subtitles.

Support for this 2026 FotoFocus Biennial exhibition programming was provided in part by FotoFocus.