Calavera Highway
SYNOPSIS
When Armando and Carlos Peña set off to carry their mother’s ashes back to South Texas and reunite with their brothers, the road reveals more than they bargained for. The feature documentary, Calavera Highway traces the odyssey of two brothers as they decipher their family’s story—why their mother Rosa was outcast by her own family, and what happened to their father Pedro, who disappeared during the notorious 1954 U.S. government deportation program, “Operation Wetback,” in which over a million Mexican and Mexican Americans were forced across the border. Calavera Highway is a sweeping story of a family of seven men grappling with the meaning of masculinity, fatherhood, and a legacy of rootless beginnings.
Calavera Highway is directed and produced by Renee Tajima-Peña and produced by Evangeline Griego.
SCREENINGS + AWARDS
PBS “P.O.V.” broadcast – Flaherty at BAM Rose Cinema, Opening Night – Atlanta Docufest, Best Drama Documentary – Chicago Int’l Film Festival, Silver Hugo Television Award – San Diego Latino Film Festival, Best Feature Documentary – San Francisco International Film Festival, Golden Gate Award
To access a facilitator’s guide to this film, click here.
“An intimate and elegantly crafted work of cinema verite, Calavera Highway encompasses universal familial tensions, Mexican-American identity, the responsibilities of fathers (and sons) and the psychic malleability of map-drawn borders.”
SF360, Independent View
"'Calavera Highway takes us on a unique journey into the many Americas disputing the heartland and the border, and does so with energy, sophistication and a deeply literary resonance."
Ariel Dorfman, writer and activist
“The best film previewed…The film is filled with affecting moments, but the most powerful is incredibly simple: In footage culled from family home movies, one of the adult sons is sitting on the sofa next to his frail, sleeping, dying mother; he simply looks at her for a while, and then drops his eyes to his hands, resting in his lap. There’s so much grief and sadness in that quick exchange, it breaks your heart.”
Los Angeles Weekly
