Face-to-Face with the Filmmaker, Tuesday, June 24

Based on the award-winning fictional memoir Breaking Through by Francisco Jiménez , THE UNBROKEN SKY relates an immigrant tale that is as timely today as the time it depicts.

One night in 1947, a bewildered, excited four-year-old Mexican boy and his family crawl through a hole under a barbed-wire fence. On the other side: America. This is Francisco’s odyssey… a childhood of working in the fields and struggling to attend school; a close-knit family surviving in constant fear of deportation.

was filmed on location in the area where Dr. Francisco Jiménez and his family lived and worked in the 1950s. Some scenes were shot in the specific locations where the real events took place. The strawberry field scene was filmed in a field where the Jiménez family actually worked as pickers in the 1950s and 1960s. It is still an active strawberry field and is now owned and operated by a Mexican-American family of growers that started out as migrant farmworkers decades ago.

Post screening, join our guests in Q&A

Lucho Ramirez founded Cine+Mas SF in 2008 and is a favorite Presenting Partner at Bernal Heights Outdoor Cinema's Film Crawl on Cortland. Lucho's love for Spanish-speaking films began in Chicago where he grew up. As a bilingual teenager, Lucho marveled at the variety of tones found in the Spanish speaking films he’d watch at the neighborhood Spanish language theater. After completing business school in Phoenix, teaching English in Japan, and working in film distribution in Paris, Ramirez arrived in San Francisco in 1997. He began his career in film festival programming for the San Francisco International Latino Film Festival. When that festival folded, Lucho started Cine+Mas SF.

Normandie Ramirez has a long career in advertising, broadcast, branded content and independent film production. Her passion for collaboration, communication and her belief in the power of story-telling is fundamental and integral to everything she does. Normandie fell in love with the beloved memoirs of Dr. Francisco Jiménez. It was a deep and profound calling that led to her producing the award-winning short film The Unbroken Sky, an immigrant tale dedicated to migrants in every land.

Robin Mortarotti is an award-winning filmmaker with over forty years experience as a producer and director of photography on feature, documentary, commercial, and indie films. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the C.I.N.E. Golden Eagle, a Columbia/duPont, and Sigma Delta Chi for A Death in the Family and Enrique’s Story, narrated by James Earl Jones.

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