Paul Espinosa
Director, Writer, Producer

Paul Espinosa, an award-winning filmmaker based in San Diego, is President of Espinosa Productions.  He has been involved with producing films for nearly 40 years, specializing in both documentary and dramatic films focused on the U.S.-Mexico border region.  Espinosa has produced, directed or written numerous films for PBS including: The U.S.-Mexican War: 1846-1848, The Lemon Grove Incident, ...and the earth did not swallow him, The Border, The Hunt for Pancho Villa, Ballad of an Unsung Hero, The Price of Renewal, In the Shadow of the Law, and Uneasy Neighbors. He received his B.A. degree from Brown University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in Anthropology. Espinosa's films have been screened at festivals around the world and have won many awards including eight Emmys.

Mark Day
Producer

Mark Day is an independent producer who has written, produced, and directed three award-winning films: Stepan Chemical: The Poisoning of a Mexican Community; River of Broken Promises; and The San Patricios: the Tragic Story of the St. Patrick's Battalion.  He received an Emmy nomination for Sex Trafficking: Looking for the Indicators, a television crime special. He has worked as a producer on numerous television documentaries for Antelope Films, Yorkshire Films, ITN (England), the Canadian Broadcasting Company, WGBH (Frontline), and other independent production companies.  He holds a Masters of Arts degree in journalism and a Masters of Fine Arts in professional writing from the University of Southern California.

Michael Bovee
Producer

Michael Bovee is an award-winning editor, producer and director who has been producing documentaries, commercials, music videos, and marketing videos for nearly twenty years.  His feature documentary, Liquid Stage: The Lure of Surfing about the essence and history of surfing, aired nationally on PBS, internationally on the Discovery Channel, and received a CINE Golden Eagle award as well as three regional Emmys. He was a participant in the Enhanced TV workshop at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, the world’s leading workshop for creative application of interactive television technology.  He was the series editor for The Border, a two-hour PBS program on the issues along the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as the producer, director, and editor of Cancer Wars, a series of short documentaries about various individual battles in the war on cancer.

Maria Zeiss
Editor

Maria Zeiss is an Emmy nominated editor and producer based in San Diego. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Social Communications in Venezuela. She has worked in different genres since 1981 but her passion and expertise lies primarily in editing long form documentaries. Maria’s major editing credits and awards include: The Price of Renewal, which was Best Documentary Editing Nominee, Sacramento International Film Festival; Remaking American Medicine, Cine Golden Eagle Award for PBS; Sands of Silence, NALIP Participant for Inerlens Productions; Piragua, Best Documentary, IV National Film Festival; Angeles Desterrados, Special Award, International Film/Video Festival; and Buscando América and Crónica Anónicas, a documentary series for HBO Ole.

Simone Hogan
Director of Photography

Simone Hogan, owner and operator of Coastline Productions, has been in the video business since 1989. Starting out as videographer and editor, she produced her first documentary, Test the West!, at the age of 23 with nothing but a borrowed S-VHS camcorder and a whole lot of passion. She has provided video production services since 1993 from La Paz, Baja Mexico to Seattle, all the way up the Pacific coastline, hence the name, Coastline Productions.  She is a native of Germany and completely bilingual. She has worked for German Television and freelances for Blue Crane Digital as their German language producer.

Vicente Franco
Director of Photography

Vicente Franco is a Cinematographer who has been working in film and television since 1982 as a DP/Producer/Director for many independent film and television productions in the United States and Latin America.  He shot and co-directed the Academy Award-nominated Daughter from Danang.  As an independent filmmaker, he has produced, directed, shot or edited numerous documentaries and has served as Director of Photography on: Botany of Desire, Latin Music USA, The Summer of Love (for the American Experience), Orozco: Man of Fire, Thirst, The New Americans, Freedom on my Mind (Academy Award Nominee), The Fight in the Fields, The Good War and Those who Refused to Fight it, Nicaragua: For the First Time, El Teatro Campesino: The First Twenty Years, and Discovering Dominga.

Alma Martinez
Narrator

Alma Martinez is an acclaimed film, television and theatre actor. Her deep Mexican and indigenous heritage, decades of landmark social justice projects with Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino and facile ability to code-switch and weave language and cultures (English-Spanish-Spanglish) makes her one of Hollywood’s most versatile and uniquely creative actors. Her decades of solid and lauded work, including the Peabody Award winning first season of The Bridge F/X, have pushed her to the forefront as one of the industry’s most captivating leading character actors.

Quetzal Flores
Original Score

Growing up in grassroots movements, as the son of labor union organizers, Quetzal Flores inherited an undying accountability for community struggles. Since 1993, he has worked as the musical director for the East Los Angeles based rock group Quetzal. He has shared the stage and collaborated with groups and artist such as Los Lobos, Taj Majal, Zack De La Rocha (Rage Against the Machine), Los Van Van, Son De Madera and Susana Baca. His ensemble Quetzal has participated in the Homegrown Music Series at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, the traveling exhibit American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music, and completed five albums, the latest of which, Imaginaries, was released on the Smithsonian Folkways label.