KPBS TO AIR OCEANSIDE DIRECTOR’S FILM
Documentary by Isaac Artenstein will air at 7 p.m. Jan. 11
“A Long Journey: The Hidden Jews of the Southwest,” a new film by Isaac Artenstein, will have its area TV premiere Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. on KPBS.
The hourlong documentary is the latest work by the Oceanside-based director, whose previous films include “Tijuana Jews,” “To the Ends of the Earth: A Portrait of Jewish San Diego,” “Border Brujo” and “Challah Rising in the Desert: The Jews of New Mexico.”
“A Long Journey” was completed before the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The film focuses on residents of the American Southwest known as conversos. The term refers to people who have lived as Catholics in order to hide their Jewish heritage. Many conversos f led their native countries during the Spanish Inquisition of the late 1400s or during the subsequent Mexican Inquisition, which stretched from the late 1500s to the early 1800s.
“The bottom line for everyone we interviewed is identity and some of them feel a spiritual awakening,” said award-winning filmmaker Artenstein, who grew up in Tijuana and Chula Vista. “As conversos, they all shared an identity that they feel had been denied from them and they now really treasure their Judaic heritage.”
“A Long Journey” had a simultaneous international premiere Nov. 19 on KNME, New Mexico’s PBS outlet, and across Mexico on Canal 22, the country’s leading public TV station devoted to cultural programming. KNME was a key source of funding for “A Long Journey.” The version of the film shown in Mexico has Spanish subtitles.
Artenstein, 66, has directed 10 films and has a similar number of production and writing credits. A graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles, he has taught courses on film production and the history of Mexican cinema at UC San Diego and the University of San Diego.
All his movies have been released through Cinewest, the company he co-founded in 1979 with his wife, Jude, a fellow filmmaker. He is now working on two new documentaries about the Jewish legacies in Arizona and El Paso, Texas.