Gabi Espinosa

Cornell students Michelle Garcia and Casey Minella and community member Gabriela Estrella-Tellez film at Ithaca Airport.

An international collaborative filmmaking effort will premiere its first project, a 10-minute film titled “The Long Wait,” Monday, March 24, at 4:30 p.m. in G08 Uris Hall.

“The Long Wait” was written by Juliette Ramírez Corazón, College of Arts and Sciences advising dean and Latino Student Success Office adviser. The film tells the story of a middle-aged woman who is transformed by a chance encounter in an airport with a young, open lesbian couple.

Teatrotaller, a Cornell Spanish-language theater group, and Cultura!, a  Latino community group, have been collaborating with La Poderosa, which works with at-risk youth in Chile and Ecuador, on film projects in both countries. The groups have been holding storytelling/writing workshops in their respective communities since September 2013.

A group from La Poderosa flew from Chile and Ecuador to participate in the filming at the Ithaca Airport Feb. 24 to March 8. A Chilean student, 17-year-old Diego Vidal, polished the script and directed the film. College of Arts and Sciences students Michelle Garcia ’17 and Casey Minella ’14 played the younger couple, with Ithaca community members filling main roles and serving as extras. The film has dialogue in English and Spanish.

Corazón will speak after the screening about the inspiration for “The Long Wait” and the process of writing a screenplay. “I loved discussing the story in depth with La Poderosa’s filmmaking team and the Cornell students,” says Corazón. “It was a fascinating process, to create a living, breathing film out of a story that started off as a couple of pages of text.”

Says Debra Castillo, Teatrotaller faculty adviser and Emerson Hinchliff Chair of Hispanic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature: “It was a wonderful collaboration with the community and with the airport management.”

The project is co-sponsored by Teatrotaller, Latin American Studies Program, Latino Studies Program, Student Assembly Finance Commission and the Department of Comparative Literature.

Linda B. Glaser is staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.