For its second year, the Latin American Film Festival of Dallas will return to Spacy, a microcinema in the heart of Tyler Station.
From March 21–23, LAFFD 2025 will feature 11 films that demonstrate the breadth of contemporary Latin American cinema alongside repertory screenings of classic films from the region. While these are mostly contemporary works, there are also curated repertory screenings on the schedule (including the 1949 Mexican comedy Tender Pumpkins).
LAFFD remains the only film festival in DFW solely dedicated to Latin American cinema; other festivals may program these films or have a specific block acknowledging Latin American movies, but no one else has built a slate entirely dedicated to them.
Jhon Hernandez, who co-founded the festival with Tony Nguyen and serves as its lead programmer, feels more confident heading into LAFFD’s second year.
“The first year we were just trying to see if this was something that people were interested in,” says Hernandez. “Now we’re trying to build off that initial experience. We’re experimenting with how to market, how to advertise this thing, with the movies that we’re playing.”
Hernandez says that while they want the festival to evolve, they also want to carry over the things that work from year to year. In 2024, a late evening screening on a Friday night seemed to strike the right tone for the event, entertaining and bringing people together.
“We wanted to recreate that experience, which is kind of why we made the Friday night 9 p.m. slot our opening night slot,” he says.
This year’s opening film is Bionico’s Bachata, a 2024 film from the Dominican Republic that won a SXSW Audience Award. Hernandez describes it as an “outrageous” mockumentary that he thought “would be a good shot in the arm to the festival, just to kick things off.”
Ahead of the screening of Bionico’s Bachata, LAFFD will host a mixer at Oak Cliff Brewing Co. (also located in Tyler Station). The mixer is free to attend and open to anyone who wants to socialize with the festival crew and other movie lovers.
Though the political atmosphere has undergone radical shifts since LAFFD launched a year ago, Hernandez says that the moment’s urgency is not lost on them. Still, their goal remains the same: to provide a home for films that have historically not been distributed widely in the United States and a window into another part of the world.
“We want to let people know that there’s a million things out there that don’t get distribution, that don’t get traditional festival play in North America and Texas,” Hernandez says. This year, the organizers focused on balancing explicitly political features with other types of films to show the variety of work produced by Latin American artists.
Ahead of the screening of Bionico’s Bachata, LAFFD will host a mixer at Oak Cliff Brewing Co. (also located in Tyler Station). The mixer is free to attend and open to anyone who wants to socialize with the festival crew and other movie lovers.
Though the political atmosphere has undergone radical shifts since LAFFD launched a year ago, Hernandez says that the moment’s urgency is not lost on them. Still, their goal remains the same: to provide a home for films that have historically not been distributed widely in the United States and a window into another part of the world.
Films with a more political bent include the 2023 Chilean documentary Malqueridas, about women in prison who use smuggled cell phones to get photos of their children and document their lives. LAFFD will also be showing Sara Gómez’s 1974 film One Way or Another, considered the first feature-length Cuban film made by a female filmmaker, which looks at post-revolution life in Cuba.
One major addition to the 2025 festival is a $50 pass allowing attendees access to all 11 films. Without the pass, tickets to individual screenings are available for $10 on the Spacy website, so anyone who wants to commit to the event will have no trouble justifying the purchase of a badge.
Hernandez says that LAFFD is still very much in its early stages. It survived its first year and its founders are hoping to capitalize on that success with the 2025 festival. In the long term, they hope to continue expanding with more resources and partners to help them achieve their goals.
“We think the films we’ve chosen are interesting, challenging films,” Hernandez says. “Some are comedies, some are romances. Some have thriller elements. Some are, you know, politically charged documentaries.
“We want people to see these films, to engage with them. To find out what people from Chile sound like. Find out what this small town in Brazil looks like. To … look at the provinces of Buenos Aires and see, kind of, what that looks like. It’s a way to get to know these countries through cinema. And I think that’s a worthwhile goal.”
Additional information on LAFFD 2025 can be found at laffd.com. Tickets for individual screenings are available at spacydtx.com.
