LA PLOMADA (English title:  “The Weight of Remembering”) will be featured at the fourth edition of the CEMEDOC Film Festival in Mexico City, November 14-21.

The documentary is one of only 14 films, selected from the 740 entries that were submitted to the festival from more than 100 countries.  It is a co-production of White Stone Ridge Productions and the Centro Español de Tampa.

La plomada/The Weight of Remembering is our second documentary feature that explores the traces of Spanish immigration to Tampa, Florida; the first, titled Un legado de humo/A Legacy of Smoke was also featured at CEMEDOC in 2015.

The film is structured by a narrator’s search to understand the meaning of a mysterious heirloom he has inherited from his Spanish immigrant grandfather.  With that goal in mind, he travels from his New York home to Tampa, Florida. And before long, thanks to the amazing cast of tampeños the narrator encounters there, he finds himself immersed in the sights, sounds, textures tastes and smells of a world on the verge of disappearing.  The trailer can be viewed here.

The film will be screened at three different venues in Mexico City during the festival run: James D. Fernández will present and discuss the film at a special fourth screening, followed by a closing reception, on Sunday, November 19, at 12:00 noon.  All festival activities are free and open to the public.

Saturday, 18 November 13:00

Filmoteca UNAM, Circuito Maestro Mario de la Cueva S/N, Coyoacán, Cd. Universitaria

Sunday, 19 November

12:00  Ateneo de España en México, Calle Hamburgo 6, Delegación Cuauhtémoc (followed by a closing cocktail reception.)

16:00: Casa de Cultura Tepito, Rivero #12, Colonia Morelos

18:00: Cine Lido, Av. Tamaulipas 202, Hipódromo Condesa

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About the filmmakers

*Luis Argeo Fernández Álava (Asturias, 1975) received his Licentiate in Journalism (1988) from the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca. A filmmaker and journalist, he has written over 15 guides and travel books for Anaya Touring, Spain’s leading publisher in that genre.  Among numerous film credits, he has written and directed two documentary films about Spaniards in the United States:  AsturianUS, a portrait of Asturian immigrants in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and Corsino, by Cole Kivlin, the story of a Spanish Civil War orphan who was raised in Texas.

*James D. Fernández (Brooklyn, NY, 1961) received his BA from Dartmouth College, and his MA and PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. A Professor at New York University since 1995, Fernández’s published books and articles have focused primarily on Spanish literature, culture and history in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries, with a particular emphasis on the links between Spain and the Americas.

About the collaboration

*For the last ten years, Argeo and Fernández have been crisscrossing the US and Spain, in an effort to reconstruct the history of Spanish immigration to the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They have interviewed scores of descendants of Spanish immigrants in both countries, and have digitized dozens of family archives.  The products of this research, thus far, have been the book Invisible Immigrants:  Spaniards in the US (1868-1945), and three documentary films that they have written, shot and edited together:  one set in Monterey, California (La paella de Daniel Albert/Dan Albert’s Paella, 2012), and two set in Tampa (Un legado de humo/A Legacy of Smoke, 2014 and La plomada/The Weight of Remembering, 2017.) The two Tampa films are the product of material gathered by Fernández and Argeo during six trips made to Tampa between 2013 and 2016. Their Facebook page (Spanish Immigrant in the United States) has almost 15,000 followers, and has become an important point of reference for descendants of Spanish immigrants.