The 3rd Latin SoTL conference brought together educators from across Latin America focused on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Kupatadze, who teaches in ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ’s Department of World Languages and Cultures, presented two sessions. Her keynote, “From Local Perspectives to Global Conversations: Strategies for Effective Dissemination and Publication of SoTL,” addressed how Latin American educators can share their innovative teaching practices with international audiences. Her workshop, “From Frustration to Opportunity: Exploring the International Publication Potential of Your Work,” helped participants reframe their classroom challenges as valuable research opportunities.

“What moved me most was witnessing the energy, enthusiasm, and dedication of colleagues who accomplish so much with limited resources,” Kupatadze reflected. “The Latin SoTL community is doing extraordinary work, often in challenging circumstances, and their voices are essential to understanding learning in diverse global contexts.”

A central theme of Kupatadze’s presentations was that the global conversation about teaching and learning is incomplete without robust participation from Latin American scholars. She emphasized that the pedagogical innovations emerging from Latin American classrooms, where educators regularly navigate large class sizes, diverse student populations, and resource constraints, offer valuable insights for the international academic community.

Following the conference, Kupatadze is exploring collaborative opportunities with Latin SoTL leaders, including a potential reflective article for the journal Teaching and Learning Inquiry that would examine how the international SoTL community can better support and amplify Latin American educational scholarship.

“These colleagues aren’t asking for help, they’re offering knowledge the world needs,” Kupatadze said. “My goal is to help build bridges so their essential contributions reach the global stage they deserve.”

During their visit, the ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ community had the opportunity to view Guérette’s film “L’audience” (The Hearing) which documents a Congolese family’s journey immigrating to Canada. The screening was followed by a Q and A session with Carballo and Guérette. Both visitors spoke extensively about their experience with the Canadian immigration system and the process of applying and being granted refugee status in Canada. ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ students and faculty also enjoyed conversations with Carballo who offered insights about her experience as a writer, translator and interpreter, as well as an immigrant.

Both Carballo and Guérette graciously spoke to classes and interacted with ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ students. This was a wonderful opportunity to engage students with diverse voices and perspectives on immigration narratives.

The visits were made possible by the generous support from and collaboration with the Fund for Excellence Grunt from ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ College, the College of Arts and Sciences, Sigma Delta Pi Honor Society, Global Neighborhood and the Department of World Languages and Cultures.

Sala is a native of the Spanish region of Cataluña but a nationalized Mexican citizen. He has won more than 80 awards for his short films. His short film titled, “Hiyab” was nominated for the Goya Award for Best Fictional Short Film in 2005.

“Guie’Dani’s Navel,” his first feature film as a director, was selected in more than 30 festivals and won nine awards, including Special Mention Award for Mexican Feature Film Actress and the Cinepolis Distribution Award at the Morelia Film Festival in Mexico.

The film follows Guie’dani, a Zapotec indigenous girl, who moves to Mexico City with her mother to work in the house of an upper-middle-class family. Guie’Dani refuses to live the life of servitude and rebels against the family’s racist and classist attitudes and behavior, and searches for freedom through her friendship with another teenage girl.

In striking contrast to Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” Guie’Dani’s Navel confronts head-on racial, ethnic, linguistic and class discriminations towards the indigenous people still prevalent in Mexico and beyond.

As the director pointed out during the Q&A, “Guie’Dani’s Navel” is the first-ever Mexican film with two Zapotec women protagonists.

As a Catalan, he found a special bond with the Zapotec indigenous community who have been marginalized by the larger Mexican national identity politics, both historically and recently.

Sala commented that during the process of filming, he and his crew were particularly careful with the dialect that the two women spoke and spent hours, if not days, trying to use the correct and accurate forms and vocabulary, in order to convey the specificities of the protagonists’ identity through language with documentary realism.

As ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ community reflects on the issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as global citizenship, films such as “Guie’Dani’s Navel” offer an extremely rich opportunity to learn about the issues of racism, classism, national, ethnic and linguistic identities and the role they all play in the ways in which our societies value or fail to value each individual. 

The film series was made possible with the support of Pragda, The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of Spain and SPAIN Arts and Culture. It was organized by Associate Professor of Spanish Mayte de Lama, Lecturer Ricardo Mendoza and Senior Lecturer in Spanish Ketevan Kupatadze. Helen McLeod assisted in interpreting from English to Spanish during the Q&A.

The film series began Friday, Sept. 10 with the first of five films from Spanish-speaking countries and will continue through Nov. 18.

The series is hosted by the Department of World Languages and Cultures in collaboration with and co-sponsored by the Global Neighborhood, Global Education Center, Latin American Studies, Sigma Delta Pi, Peace and Conflict Studies, International and Global Studies, CREDE, El Centro and Poverty and Social Justice Studies.

The first film, “A este lado del mundo”Ìý(in English “On This Side of the World”), is directed by well-known and celebrated Spanish novelist and filmmaker, David Trueba. It was released in 2020 and was a contestant for the best film and best screenplay at several international film festivals, including the Goya Awards and the Festival de Málaga (Malaga Film Festival).

The story follows a young engineer who is fired from his job and begins to work as a freelancer to Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa and a gate to Europe to help with the reinforcement of the fence that is supposed to keep undocumented immigrants from Spain and then Europe. Trueba turns his gaze and our attention towards the “natives,” the ones living on the privileged side of the world and reflects on their responsibilities, as well as their complicity with the dehumanizing scene on the border.

More information about the other four films, including their screening locations, dates and times, .

The film series was made possible with the support of Pragda, The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of Spain and SPAIN Arts and Culture. It was organized by associate professor of Spanish Mayte de Lama, lecturer Ricardo Mendoza and senior lecturer in Spanish Ketevan Kupatadze.

Reading the works of prominent Chilean authors such as José Donoso, Isabel Allende, Roberto Bolaño and Alberto Fuguet, some of the more specific questions that Isabel’s research addresses are whether the social and political messages of these writers are still relevant to contemporary Chilean readership; if modern readers understand their messages in the context of the events and social environment of the authors’ lives or in a modern context; and, to what extent does their use of the literary technique of Magical Realism affect (hinder or promote) the understanding of these sociopolitical messages.

September

Friday, Sept. 12
, Dir. Moisés Sepúlveda (Chile, 2014)
LaRose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, 6 p.m.

Ximena is an illiterate woman in her fifties, who has learned to live on her own in order to keep her illiteracy as a secret. Jackelin, is a young unemployed elementary school teacher, who tries to convince Ximena to take reading classes. Persuading her proves to be an almost impossible task, until one day, Jackeline finds something Ximena has been keeping as her only treasure since she was a child: a letter Ximena’s father left when he abandoned her many years before. Thus, the two women embark on a learning journey where they discover that there are many ways of being illiterate, and that not knowing how to read is just one of them.

Friday, Sept. 26
(Who is Dayani Cristal?),  Dir. Marc Silver (México, USA, 2014)
LaRose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, 6 p.m.

Deep in the sun-blistered Sonora desert beneath a cicada tree, Arizona border police discover a decomposing male body. Lifting a tattered T-shirt they expose a tattoo that reads “Dayani Cristal.” Who is this person? What brought him here? How did he die? And who—or what—is Dayani Cristal?

Following a team of dedicated forensic anthropologists from the Pima County Morgue in Arizona, director Marc Silver seeks to answer these questions and give this anonymous man an identity. As the forensic investigation unfolds, Mexican actor and activist Gael Garcia Bernal retraces this man’s steps along the migrant trail in Central America. In an effort to understand what it must have felt like to make this final journey, he embeds himself among migrant travelers on their own mission to cross the border. He experiences first-hand the dangers they face and learns of their motivations, hopes and fears. As we travel north, these voices from the other side of the border wall give us a rare insight into the human stories, which are so often ignored in the immigration debate.

Winner of the Sundance 2013 Cinematography award and nominated in the World Documentary Competition, Who Is Dayani Cristal? shows how one life becomes testimony to the tragic results of the U.S. war on immigration.

October

Friday, Oct. 3
, Dir. Mariana Rondón (Venezuela, 2013)
LaRose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, 6 p.m.

A nine-year-old boy’s preening obsession with straightening his hair elicits a tidal wave of homophobic panic in his hard-working mother, in this tender but clear-eyed coming-of-age tale from Venezuelan writer-director Mariana Rondón.

The slippery nature of identity — how it forms in us, the ways it tells us how we might want to look or who we desire — is at the heart of this third feature from Venezuelan writer-director Marina Rondón. At times harsh but often tender, Bad Hair exudes compassion for all involved, even Marta, whose concerns may be grounded in homophobic panic but whose desperation is almost palpable. This is a story of people doing what they feel they have to, partly out of fear, but also out of love.”- Diana Vargas, Toronto International Film Festival.

November

Friday, Nov. 7
, Dir. Ignacio Ferreras  (Spain, 2014)
LaRose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, 6 p.m.

Based on Paco Roca’s National Award-winning graphic novel, Wrinkles illustrates the visual beauty and tender emotion that can be created by traditional animation, as it tackles a universal subject matter with humor and acerbic wit.

The story opens with former bank manager Emilio being dispatched to a retirement home by his family. His new roommate is a wily, wheeler-dealer named Miguel, who cheerfully swindles small amounts of cash from the more befuddled residents but is also full of handy insider tips that are crucial to survival. Like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in an old folks home, we are introduced to daily pill regimens, electric gates, and an eccentric cast of characters who rebel against institutional authority, while doing everything in their power to avoid being assigned to the dreaded top floor assisted living wing – a dwelling place for lost souls from which there is no return.

The hand-drawn animation style allows the film to move freely between the reality-bound daily lives of the ‘inmates’ and their more colorful dementia-induced fantasies, leaving plenty of room for both tears and laughter and pulling no punches in its critique of society’s attitude towards the elderly. Wrinkles was dubbed by Martin Sheen and Matthew Modine in its English version.

Friday, Nov. 21
, Dir. Juan Carlos Valdivia (Bolivia, 2012)
LaRose Digital Theatre, Koury Business Center, 6 p.m.

La Paz’s Zona Sur neighborhood is Bolivia’s most exclusive enclave and has housed the country’s affluent elite for generations. Here, in an adobe-tile-roofed castle, a statuesque matriarch reigns over her spoiled offspring and indigenous servants. Social change, however unwelcome, is on its way. As the mother squabbles with her self-indulgent, oversexed teenage son and clashes with her petulant daughter, her 6-year-old boy wanders the rooftops unsupervised. The scent of impending decline permeates the air, and the threat of aristocratic privileges quickly changing hands heralds a new era in a seemingly interminable class war.

Bolivia’s official entry for the Academy® Awards foreign-language film race, this searing portrait of a patrician family in flux eloquently chronicles their final days during a time of intense social change and cogently exposes the bubble of decadence in which they exist.

“We Women Warriors” is an independent documentary feature that follows three native women caught in the crossfire of Colombia’s warfare who are using nonviolent resistance to defend their people’s survival. In Colombia there are 102 aboriginal groups, one-third of which are in danger of extinction because of the ongoing conflict. Trapped in a protracted predicament financed by the drug trade, indigenous women are resourcefully leading and creating transformation imbued with hope. “We Women Warriors” bears witness to rights abuses and interweaves character-driven stories about female empowerment, unshakable courage and faith in the survival of indigenous culture.

Sept. 6, 2013
EVEN THE RAIN [También la Lluvia]. Director: Icíar Bollaín/104 min./2011
Location: LaRose Theatre, Koury Business Center
Time: 6 p.m.

Sept. 20, 2013
HERE AND THERE [Aquí y Allá]. Director: Antonio Méndez Esparza/USA, Spain, Mexico/110 min./2012
Location: McEwen 011
Time: 6 p.m.

Oct. 4, 2013
THE RETURN [El Regreso]. Director: Hernán Jiménez/Costa Rica/ 95 min./2011
Location: LaRose Theatre, Koury Business Center
Time: 6 p.m.

Oct. 25, 2013
WILAYA. Director: Pedro Pérez Rosado/ Spain/ 97 min./2012
Location: LaRose Theatre, Koury Business Center, ÂÒÂ×ÊÓƵ U.
Time: 6 p.m.

Nov. 8, 2013
THE DEATH OF PINOCHET [La Muerte de Pinochet]. Directors: Bettina Perut, Ivan Osnovikoff/67 min./2011
Location: LaRose Theatre, Koury Business Center
Time: 6 p.m.

The Spanish Film Club Film series was made possible with the support of Pragda, and the Embassy of Spain in Washington, D.C., Spain-USA Foundation. 

Special thanks to the Secretary of State for Culture of Spain.

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Ketevan Kupatadze, lecturer of Spanish, published a book chapter titled “Magic of the City: Travel Narratives of Project Año 0” in Topodynamics of Arrival: Essays on Self and Pilgrimage, edited by Gert Hofmann and Snjezana Zoric and published by Rodopi. 

In the chapter, Kupatadze explores the role of the metropolis in today’s society viewed through the lenses of contemporary Spanish American authors who traveled to various metropolitan cities around the globe and documented what they saw and experienced.