Refreshingly sophisticated in both form and content, Brincando el Charco contemplates the notion of ‘identity’ through the experiences of a Puerto Rican woman living in the US.

In a wonderful mix of fiction, archival footage, processed interviews and soap opera drama, Brincando el Charco tells the story of Claudia Marin, a middle-class, light-skinned Puerto Rican photographer/videographer who is attempting to construct a sense of community in the US. Confronting the simultaneity of both her privilege and her oppression, Brincando el Charco becomes a meditation on class, race and sexuality as shifting differences.

During this edition, one of Negrón-Muntane’s short films will also be screened: ‘Small City, Big Change’. This film portrays how the smallest city of Massachusetts, of mostly Latino working class residents, provided the key leadership for the approval of the Transgender Equal Rights Act of the state.

Q&A with the director

After the screening, there will also be a Q&A session with director Frances Negrón-Muntane. And on 13 October, she will provide a Doing Gender lecture.

Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, scholar and professor at Columbia University, where she is the founding director of the Media and Idea Lab and founding curator of

the Latino Arts and Activism Archive at Columbia’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. She also served as the director of Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race from 2009-2016.

Negrón-Muntaner’s work spans multiple disciplines and practices, including cinema, literature, cultural criticism, and politics. Her work focuses on a comparative exploration of coloniality in the Americas, with special attention to the intersections between race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.