A beacon for film and archives in the Valley

ENTRE, a film center and regional archive in McAllen with a focus on workshops centered on filmmaking, film screenings and the collection,  preservation, digitization of home movies and oral histories, hopes to plant and expand these ideas about film throughout the Rio Grande Valley. 

Founded in October 2021 by Andres Sanchez and C. Díaz, ENTRE has hosted a variety of events in the last year throughout the Rio Grande Valley, from workshops and film screenings to Home Movie Day, where community members were welcomed to bring their old home movies to view. 

Receiving a $20,000 Interchange Artist Grant from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the founders said ENTRE’s first introduction to the community was at the McAllen Art Walk in October 2021, which was followed by a community plática for anyone interested in the organization. 

The founders, having been friends for several years, said they had both been dreaming and scheming up the idea of ENTRE since March 2021. 

Previously living in Los Angeles, Díaz told The Rider that being active in the Echo Park Film Center, a community film center in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, is one of the biggest models for the blueprint for ENTRE. 

Seeing how involved Sanchez was with the community and the arts, Díaz said, “I shared [with Sanchez] this, like, big manifesto that I had written about the film center and, like, what kind of things we would offer and our values. … I asked if he was down to go in and start making this thing become a reality. … And ever since then, we’ve just been kind of working towards it, applying for grants … brainstorming ideas for workshops, and screenings and stuff like that.” 

 Some of the workshops recently involved direct animation, cameras, lighting and, most recently, an eight-week intensive workshop focused on documentary filmmaking over the summer. 

“We met every Saturday in the afternoon for about four hours,” Díaz said. “And we talked about the ethics of documentaries, different documentary styles, camera, lighting, sound 101,  editing 101. … We wanted people to experiment and play around with storytelling and find their voice through that experimentation.” 

On Sept. 3, ENTRE screened the documentaries at COMMONSPACE in McAllen  for the community, which brought their biggest crowd yet. 

“[The audience was] really engaging with the filmmakers after the screen at the Q&A panel,” Díaz said. “So that was really awesome to give the filmmakers that time to answer questions and kind of think about their work in different ways and just celebrate them for all the hard work they were doing.” 

Set on hosting film screenings each month for the community, Sanchez said the first screening happened in April with “Late Spring,” a 1949 black-and-white Japanese drama directed by Yasujirō Ozu. 

Hoping to have multiple screenings per month for 2023, Díaz said it is important to show films not  normally seen in the Valley. 

“They’re mostly films that are either indie underground, avant-garde or obscure, or community made,” they said. “… We’re trying to bring [an] alternative type of screening menu to the RGV … the things we see that people have more access to in larger metropolitan areas. And the thing is that we deserve to have all those things, too.” 

Sanchez agreed with Díaz, saying growing up in the Valley without access to a lot of alternative films is why the focus on screenings is to provide the community with access to those types of films. 

“Growing up in it …  seeing how things have kind of, like, always, you know, resisted a lot of more fringe or more, like, experimental, not as accessible or not as easily digested types of art and media, the Valley always, you know, felt like it’s just been missing something and not to mean that kind of art hasn’t been made here,” he said. “There’s always people who are pushing the envelope and trying new things and expressing new ideas, but finding the support system and the infrastructure to support that has always been a challenge.” 

Sanchez added that until folks are exposed to an idea, they may not come across it naturally so he cannot expect people to immediately embrace the avant-garde but, by providing access to these types of films, skills, knowledge and even the idea of an archive, he hopes it expands support for these ideas in the community. 

Recently hosting an event for Home Movie Day on Oct. 15 at the McAllen Creative Incubator,  ENTRE let community members view their old home videos from 8-mm to VHS, educated attendees on how to preserve them and also introduced the service of digitizing and archiving home movies. 

With the archival center starting off a bit slow with not many opportunities for people to donate their films, Sanchez said ENTRE is working on providing transfer facilities for people to come in and digitize their films. 

“I think folks in the Valley are well aware of the fact that our history is important to document, and [in] an effort to preserve that and help more people become aware of our history and … also just the life and times of this place, I think, so far, has been supported as an idea,” he said. 

Those interested in transfer services may contact ENTRE at its Instagram @entre.tx or via email at info@entrefilmcenter.org to set up appointments. ENTRE’s office is located at the McAllen Creative Incubator and also offers rental equipment, such as projectors, cameras and a film library. Rental fees vary by equipment. 

“An issue in our region is that there is not much documentation from people of color living here, because that’s the problem with archival institutions,” Díaz said. “They come from an extractive and exploitative background. … What we’re hoping to do with the archive is open that back up to the people who were living during those times, whether that be through oral history documentation … through home movies, which are time capsules of a place and culture and can tell us so much about our history.” 

Boca Chica, Corazón Grande, a community archival project focused on collecting and documenting the history of Boca Chica, has an open call for home movies, photographs and documentation.   

Only finding a handful of photographs of Boca Chica in the 1920s and ’30s from the Brownsville Historical Association’s archive, Díaz said they knew there had to be materials out there of people going to Boca Chica. 

“We’re hoping in the future for, like, other sort of community-led archival projects like that … and to work with people in those communities,” They said. “… So that way … these collections are made up from the people who are living in these communities rather than other people going into our communities from outside of the region and documenting what they deem is important.”

Asked what long-term goals they have for  ENTRE, the founders replied they want to have their own space to better facilitate all of their services, events and workshops, and set up a co-op membership for people who want to get more involved in the organization. 

ENTRE’s next event will be its second community film screening consisting of 30-second direct animation shorts from 17 different participants at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 3  at IMGN Park, located at 719 Ragland St. in Mission.

The admission price is yet to be determined.