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Articles by Michael Mejia
Review: Give Me the Ball!
Give Me the Ball! an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute. Less than twelve hours after the four best male tennis players in the world competed for over nine hours in two grueling, dramatic five set semifinals at the 2026 Australian Open, in Melbourne, Liz Garbus’ Give Me the Ball!, documenting the life and career of arguably the most famous American female tennis player of all time, made its Salt Lake City premiere.
Shame and Money Examines Global Economy • Salt Lake Magazine
Astrit Kabashi, Flonja Kodheli, Kumrije Hoxha, Abdinaser Beka, Tristan Halilaj, Aria Shala, Riga Morina and Melika Gashi appear in Shame and Money by Visar Morina, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Janis Mazuch Visar Morina’s fourth feature film, Shame and Money, opens with a request for money. Not that much, we might think, just 2000 Euros.
Review: Jaripeo Rides Into a New Vision of Mexican Manhood
Noe appears in Jaripeo by Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. In her landmark 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa wrote: “For men like my father, being ‘macho’ meant being strong enough to protect and support my mother and us, yet being able to show love….
Review: Filipiñana
Filipiñana, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. Filipiñana is a slow burn, a film that feels like it’s constructed of very beautiful still images, lacquered, lugubrious, and heavy. The figures in the images seem to feel it, too. Their movements and the pace of their speech are deliberate at times, tentative at others, as if they may not have intended to speak, or as if what they say may not matter to a listener, if anyone is even listening.
Review: The Huntress (La Cazadora)
Adriana Paz appears in The Huntress (La Cazadora) by Suzanne Andrews Correa, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Maria Sarasvati Herrera. The Ciudad Juárez of Suzanne Andrews Correa’s La Cazadora/The Huntress is a city overwhelmed almost to paralysis by fear.
Sundance Film Review:—American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez • Salt Lake Magazine
American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez. Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute. Pachuco, like pocho and Chicano, entered the American lexicon in the twentieth century as a term of derision. Not a positive identity but a label that effectively cordoned off the American children of Mexican immigrants—often underpaid and harshly exploited agricultural laborers—from the two cultures that were actively shaping them.
A Step Forward in Global Radiation Therapy: Lessons From the HYPNO Trial
Get full text access Log in, subscribe or purchase for full access. References 1. International Agency for Research on Cancer Global Cancer Observatory: Cancer Today 2. Overgaard, J. ∙ Hansen, H.S. ∙ Specht, L. ... Five compared with six fractions per week of conventional radiotherapy of squamous-cell carcinoma of head and neck: DAHANCA 6 and 7 randomised controlled trial Lancet. 2003; 362:933-940 3. Overgaard, J. ∙ Mohanti, B.K. ∙ Begum, N. ...
Review: Two Women at Sundance
Neighbors Violette and Florence are in parallel ruts. Violette is tied to her Montreal apartment, on maternity leave. At the same time, her husband rushes off to work in another town for days at a time, with no time for intimacy when he’s home, and anyway, as he says, Vivi’s pregnancy and the arrival of their son have kind of killed his libido.
Review: DJ Ahmet at Sundance
Georgi Unkovski’s thoroughly entertaining DJ Ahmet brings us a familiar story of country mouse-city mouse teen romance inventively recast in a rural, predominantly Muslim community in North Macedonia. Ahmet lives with his father and younger brother, Naim, who make a sparse living from their small herd of sheep and sell tobacco. At the film’s opening, Ahmet’s father withdraws the boy from school so he can help out more at home.
Review: LUZ at Sundance
Flora Lau’s labyrinthine second feature LUZ takes place in a near future, or perhaps an alternative present, in which the virtual reality game LUZ attracts players from all over the globe. Is it a game? Luz’s participants refer to “playing,” as in, “I’m going over to my friend’s house to play.” As in “playing with friends.” As in being with other people.
Sundance 2024 Film Review: Sujo (Winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize)
Building on their excellent, award-winning feature Sin señales particulares (Identifying Features), from 2020, Mexican filmmakers Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero return to Sundance this year with Sujo, the tale of a young man’s journey toward a transformative adulthood amidst the violent landscape of rural Michoacán.
Sundance 2024 Film Review: It’s What’s Inside
What interested me most in the first 20 minutes of Greg Jardin’s noisome bro-mean girl-sci-fi-freakout It’s What’s Inside, was the rather ingenious and layered moment in which the film’s nominal heroine, Shelby, scrolls through Instagram, accumulating information and anxiety in connection to the upcoming wedding of her friends Reuben and Sophia, collectively known as “#reuphia.” On their way to a pre-wedding bash, Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and her live-in boyfriend Cyrus (James Morosini), in...
Sundance 2024 Film Review: Presence
Steven Soderbergh’s latest, Presence—his 36th feature, premiering at Sundance35 years after sex, lies, and videotape, his first—opens with a handheld point-of-view shot, looking down from a second-story window onto a driveway. After a moment, the camera turns and moves rapidly, dizzyingly through the empty, darkened rooms of a 100-year-old home, upstairs and downstairs, returning, finally, to settle in a closet in the room where the journey began.
Sundance 2024 Film Review: Freaky Tales
Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden return to Sundance this year with a pretty delightful, action-packed romp through late-80s Oakland, Freaky Tales. Thefilm takes its name from a rap by Oakland legend Too $hort, who serves as our narrator and also has a brief cameo.
2024 Sundance Film Review: Eno
One benefit to a reviewer of Gary Hustwit’s innovative documentary Eno’s reported 52 quintillion possible versions is that there’s no possibility of spoilers. Practically, the film’s most significant feature is its constant reconfiguration at the digital hands of generative software Hustwit developed with artist Brendan Dawes, assuring that every showing will be different than the last.
Selección de talento humano a través de las redes sociales: un estudio de métodos mixtos
Garcés-Lescano, Alexander [1] ; Silva-Mejía, Michael [1] ; Moreno-Gavilanes, Klever [1] [1] Universidad Técnica de Ambato - Ecuador Localización: 593 Digital Publisher CEIT, ISSN-e 2588-0705, Vol. 7, Nº. 6, 2022 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Administration (nov-dec)), págs.
Sundance 2023 Film Review: Fair Play
Fair Play, director Chloe Domont’s feature debut, has gotten a fair amount of talk at Sundance, recently picking up the first major distribution deal of the festival with Netflix.
Sundance Film Review 2023: Bad Behaviour
Actress Alice Englert’s first feature Bad Behaviour is, natch, a quintessential actor’s film. Englert wrote and directed, and also co-stars alongside Jennifer Connelly, who seems born for role of Lucy, Englert’s character Dylan’s mother. As the film opens, Lucy is on her way to a quasi-silent retreat in Oregon, presided over by the enigmatic guru Elon Bello (Ben Whishaw).
Sundance 2023 Film Review: Fancy Dance
The emotional narrative of Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance is as simple as its baroque surface is complex. Roki (Isabel Delroy-Olson), a teenaged girl living on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation, in Oklahoma, has been hanging close to her aunt Jax ever since her mother Tawi, Jax’s sister, went missing. They’re both worried, but Jax (Lily Gladstone) is a master of dissemblance. It’s her superpower.
Sundance 2023 Review: 'Animalia'
Many layers of menace emerge rather quickly in Sofia Alaoui’s feature debut from Morocco, Animalia. The film opens with a Kubriackian walkthrough of the baroquely decorated, nevertheless sterile home of Amine, husband to the film’s very pregnant protagonist Itto, who we finally discover in the one room in the house filled with life, sound, and pleasure: the kitchen. Itto is working there, alongside several young maids, cutting up a chicken as she listens to the other women’s gossip and Arabic pop.
Sundance 2023 Review: 'AUM: The Cult at the End of the World'
1995 was tough on Japan. Already in the midst of a “lost decade” of economic stagnation, that January the country experienced a devastating earthquake, near Kobe, that killed more than 6000 people. Then, in March, the Tokyo subway was the target of a domestic terror attack, in which members of the apocalyptic cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas, a deadly nerve agent, on three train lines converging on Kasumigaseki, the seat of the national government.
For The Love Of Cinema: 'Kim's Video' Film Review
Perhaps destined to become a new classic of the film nerd genre, David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s documentary Kim’s Video is an entertaining, twisty, funny, dreamy, sometimes grumpy quest film, featuring co-director Redmon as its protagonist.
Broken Nose Theatre Presents BECHDEL FEST 9: NEXT LEVEL At The Den Theatre
Broken Nose Theatre will present Bechdel Fest 9: Next Level, the company's annual festival of new short plays featuring an ensemble of femme, female-identifying, non-binary, trans and queer actors talking about things other than men. This year's festival showcased eight stories that center around characters on the edge of growing up, glowing up and making big decisions that take them to - you guessed it - the next level.
'Dos Estaciones' • Salt Lake Magazine
"Dos Estaciones" by Juan Pablo González (Photo courtesy Sundance Institute) It might be said that terroir is at the heart of Juan Pablo González’s stark and subtle drama. It is, in many ways, a film about the crafting of tequila in the highlands of Jalisco, in western Mexico. As aficionados know, though tequila’s origins are ancient and mysterious (or just disputed), the spirit received Mexico’s first appellation of origin in 1974.
'Marte Um' • Salt Lake Magazine
"Marte Um" by Gabriel Martins (Photo courtesy Sundance Institute) Gabriel Martins’s (Mars One) opens with a slim teenager, Deivinho (Cícero Lucas), gazing up at the stars he longs to reach. He is seemingly unaffected by the fireworks going off over the city center of Belo Horizonte or by the few shouts accompanying this celebration, exclaiming the election of Brazil’s current authoritarian president, Jair Bolsonaro.
'Master' • Salt Lake Magazine
"Master" by Mariama Diallo (Photo courtesy Sundance Institute) Hey, did you hear? Your alma mater’s founders sold slaves to keep the doors open. It was built by slaves. It was named for a slave trader. Its law school was paid for with profits from the slave trade. These histories, all true, are the basis for the high-pitched horror of Mariama Diallo’s .
'You Won't Be Alone' • Salt Lake Magazine
In the opening sequence of Goran Stolevski’s haunting and philosophical new film , a mother comes face-to-face with an awful spirit, a witch, a legend, an old wives’ tale, known as Old Maid Maria. Seated beside the woman’s newborn baby, Maria is a frightful thing, with thin, stringy hair, her nude body livid and puckered, as if it’s been burned.
Sundance 2022 Review: 'The Princess'
Perhaps you’ve heard this story. How, once upon a time, a beautiful, young woman—a nanny of all things!—met and married a prince in an incredibly lavish ceremony observed by the whole world. And wasn’t it amazing, dreamy, romantic? The spectacle, the procession, the dress, that girl! Just like a fairy tale, they said. We said. And then the not-so-happily-ever-after followed, and we continued to watch, at least sometimes, wondering, maybe, what’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with her?
Charli And Dixie D'Amelio Launch Social Tourist
Charli And Dixie D’Amelio Launch Social Tourist May 9, 2021 Charli and Dixie D’Amelio are announcing their new clothing line Social Tourist. Social Tourist, a new brand under the Abercrombie & Fitch portfolio that will be sold at their Hollister stores and online.
‘The Book of Andy’
UW Tacoma Theatre presents ‘The Book of Andy’ By Michael J. Mejia Sat., Feb. 13, 7 p.m. Sat., Feb. 20, 7 p.m. Sat., Feb. 27, 7 p.m. Sat., March 6, 7 p.m. Virtual Event Tickets: FREE with Registration www.TacomaArtsLive.org Mature content. Not recommended for under 16. "The Book of Andy” follows Andy after he responds, "...I don’t know” to a marriage proposal from his longtime boyfriend.
'Wild Indian' • Salt Lake Magazine
Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s first feature, Wild Indian, opens with a brief historical sequence, tracking the final days, maybe moments, in the life of an Ojibwe man, stricken with smallpox. He’s weak and disoriented. He’s a little sick, we’re told, wandering West, attempting to escape his imminent death from the infection he’s received from contact with white colonists, an influence signified by the disfiguring smallpox rash covering the man’s body.
'John and the Hole' • Salt Lake Magazine Original
John is the quintessential child of white privilege. His family of four is more than comfortable in their modernist house and no one ever feels the need to talk about the labor that’s paid for their luxury. And they love the kid. Even his older sister dotes on him. He’s a fine pianist, noodling Chopin on the grand piano set before a floor to ceiling window with an impeccable view. His parents are paying a tennis pro to prepare John for a state qualifying competition.
'The Pink Cloud' • Salt Lake Magazine
So, it could be worse. We could be confined entirely to our homes, windows and doors shut tight, a candy colored airborne toxic event spreading just outside, killing anyone exposed to it in the span of just ten seconds. No need for ICU beds. No use for a vaccine. The Pink Cloud, with its tint of static dawn or dusk, is a kind of miracle, maybe a judgement, an inexplicable phenomenon. It could be industrial or natural, temporary or permanent, no one seems to know or, eventually, care.
'Cryptozoo' • Salt Lake Magazine Original
Dash Shaw’s adult animated feature Cryptozoo is a visually dazzling if somewhat familiar tale of the risks and ethical challenges of intervening in, managing and preserving wildlife. In this case, though, the wildlife are not merely endangered: they’re often unique, mythological beings ranging from a unicorn to a South American mega worm, stone chucking fairies to a Japanese dream-eating baku.
One for the Road Original
Thai director Baz Poonpiriya’s One for the Road is a lush road film, a buddy picture, a romantic comedy, an epic melodrama, a story of betrayal—or three, more or less—and the struggle for redemption. Maybe that’s one or two things too many—I’m still trying to get my head around the mother-sister thing—but when it’s all over you’re likely not going to feel as exhausted, as worked over, as you might think.
Michael Mejia
Pachuco, like pocho and Chicano, entered the American lexicon in the twentieth century as a term of derision. Not a…
VUSAC fall elections 2020
VUSAC elections were conducted online and remotely this semester. The Strand sat down with President Michelle Zhao (she/her) and Chief Returning Officer (CRO) Vibhuti Kacholia (she/her) to discuss the details students should know. VUSAC fall elections began with a campaigning period from September 19 to September 25, 2020. In order to maintain equitable campaigning, VUSAC prohibited any form of in-person or off-campus advertising, such as putting up posters.
Yalda, A Night of Forgiveness
The opening shot hovers over a major metropolis at night, illuminated by the evening traffic flowing along a network of freeways leading out to the suburbs. Dominating the foreground are the upper floors of the Milad Tower, one of the tallest in the world, a multi-use structure, sprouting from Tehran’s International Trade and Convention Center, housing a five-star hotel and supporting, at its top, the antenna of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the state-owned media monopoly.
Yalda, A Night of Forgiveness
The opening shot hovers over a major metropolis at night, illuminated by the evening traffic flowing along a network of freeways leading out to the suburbs. Dominating the foreground are the upper floors of the Milad Tower, one of the tallest in the world, a multi-use structure, sprouting from Tehran’s International Trade and Convention Center, housing a five-star hotel and supporting, at its top, the antenna of Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, the state-owned media monopoly.
Horse Girl, Losing It at the Movies
Sarah is a pretty normal girl. By day, she works at a craft store. Her coworkers are like her family. She really knows a lot about lacquers and fabrics. She’s got a good eye for color. Sometimes she goes down to the paddock after work and watches the horses and riders. Well, one particular horse. And in the evenings, she’s home, in her pajamas, binging her favorite show, Purgatory. Maybe you know it? The supernatural crime drama with that dreamy guy, Darren? Anyway, it’s good. Sarah’s good. She’s normal.
Horse Girl, Losing It at the Movies
Sarah is a pretty normal girl. By day, she works at a craft store. Her coworkers are like her family. She really knows a lot about lacquers and fabrics. She’s got a good eye for color. Sometimes she goes down to the paddock after work and watches the horses and riders. Well, one particular horse. And in the evenings, she’s home, in her pajamas, binging her favorite show, Purgatory. Maybe you know it? The supernatural crime drama with that dreamy guy, Darren? Anyway, it’s good. Sarah’s good. She’s normal.
Mucho Mucho Amor
Born in the 1930s in a rural, sugarcane-growing region of Puerto Rico, Walter Mercado says he knew he was different from a young age. He wasn’t interested in working in the cane fields or in outdoor activities. And fortunately for him, his mother encouraged his creative endeavors, like playing the piano. After training in dance and theater, he began acting in telenovelas.
Shirley, How do I love thee?
In the early 1950s, a young couple arrive in a small Vermont college town and make their way to a creepy, decaying, ivy-covered manse where they are to spend the night. The house is not haunted. Rather, it’s roiled into chaos in the midst of a bacchanal presided over by its owners, an established and voluble college professor and his more sedentary, owlish wife, who’s just had what will become one of her most famous stories, “The Lottery,” published in The New Yorker.
Shirley, How do I love thee?
In the early 1950s, a young couple arrive in a small Vermont college town and make their way to a creepy, decaying, ivy-covered manse where they are to spend the night. The house is not haunted. Rather, it’s roiled into chaos in the midst of a bacchanal presided over by its owners, an established and voluble college professor and his more sedentary, owlish wife, who’s just had what will become one of her most famous stories, “The Lottery,” published in The New Yorker.
Jumbo, If He Only Had a Heart
Jeanne is a bit of an odd duck. More than a bit shy, when she’s not working the night shift alone, cleaning up a local amusement park, her favorite pastime is building replicas of the rides in her room out of scraps of wire and Christmas lights.
alLa Llorona, When the Levee Breaks • Salt Lake Magazine
The film opens with the desperate, whispered prayers of a circle of women, three generations of the family of General Monteverde, a fictionalized version of the dictator who oversaw Guatemala’s brutal civil war in the 1980s, now, in the film’s present, on trial for genocide.
alLa Llorona, When the Levee Breaks • Salt Lake Magazine
The film opens with the desperate, whispered prayers of a circle of women, three generations of the family of General Monteverde, a fictionalized version of the dictator who oversaw Guatemala’s brutal civil war in the 1980s, now, in the film’s present, on trial for genocide.
Film Review: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets • Salt Lake Magazine
You know the place, how it smells: stale beer, spilled well liquor with cheap mixers. Things are sticky. Decades of cigarette smoke have permeated the stained carpet and couches, the regulars, too. This is precisely what Bill and Turner Ross were after when they created the Roaring 20s, a locals joint way off the Vegas strip, the setting for their nonfiction film Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets.
Film Review: Identifying Features • Salt Lake Magazine
Magdalena’s son Jesús emerges from the rural Guanajuato cornfield, as if from a dream, to inform his mother, without drama, that he’s leaving, heading north with his friend Rigo, to find work in Arizona. The friends’ departure across a wide, grassy valley, a seemingly idyllic, if impoverished, world, is an image that haunts the remainder of Fernanda Valadez’s affecting and lyrically photographed Identifying Features (Sin Señas Particulares).
Vivos, They live • Salt Lake Magazine
First, count with me to 43. It’s a simple tribute and protest practiced by the families of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were disappeared after police attacked their bus on the night of Sept 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico.
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