Director: Renee Tajima-Pena will be here in person.

 

When Armando and Carlos Pena set off to carry their mother’s ashes back to the Texas borderlands and reunite their far-flung brothers, the road reveals more than they bargained for. CALAVERA HIGHWAY traces the odyssey of two brothers as they decipher a complex story. Why their mother Rosa was outcast by her own family, and what really happened to their father Pedro, who disappeared in 1954 during “Operation Wetback,” the notorious U.S. government program that deported over a million Mexican and Mexican Americans across the border. What divides families and what brings them together? CALAVERA HIGHWAY is a sweeping family saga told against the backdrop of the Mexican American experience, as seven brothers grapple with the meaning of masculinity and fatherhood, and the nature of family ties.

Renee Tajima-Peña was nominated for an Academy Award for her documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? Her film, My America...Or Honk If You Love Buddha (1997), was an award-winner at the Sundance Film Festival.
Her other directing credits include The Mexico Story for Kartemquin Films' collaborative series on immigration; The New Americans (IDA Award winner); Labor Women; The Last Beat Movie (Sundance Channel); and The Best Hotel on Skid Row (premiered at Cannes, aired on HBO).
Tajima-Peña has been awarded the Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, two Rockefeller Fellowships in Documentary Film, a Peabody Award, a duPont-Columbia Award and other honors. She began her filmmaking career at Third World Newsreel and Asian Cine-Vision in New York and has been a film critic for The Village Voice and cultural commentator for NPR.
She is the graduate director of the masters program in social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Tajima-Peña lives in Los Angeles.