San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
What’s new in the arts this week
‘The Roads Most Traveled’ documents the work of photojournalist Don Bartletti
VIRTUALLY SPEAKING
Among the films to be screened during the first-ever San Diego International Shortsfest is “The Roads Most Traveled,” an emotionally involving 24-minute retrospective of the work of photojournalist Don Bartletti.
Bartletti spent 40 years in a distinguished career that took him from the Vista Press, to the bygone Oceanside Blade-tribune, to the then-san Diego Union and eventually to the Los Angeles Times, where he would win a Pulitzer Prize for his photojournalism in 2003.
The focus of “The Roads Most Traveled,” directed by Palomar College’s Bill Wisneski, is Bartletti’s visual documentation of the migration of Central Americans to the U.S. This includes a harrowing and heartbreaking experience riding atop freight cars bound for El Norte with his camera and little else, “an assignment,” Bartletti says in the film, “that changed my career.”
Nothing I write here can do justice to the power and poignancy of Bartletti’s photographs, both black and white and color. “The Roads Most Traveled” is a documentary that must be seen, absorbed, contemplated.
“I want people to realize that I have a soul and an obligation to record historic days in the history of our country, in some ways in the history of humanity,” says Bartletti. “Migration for survival is as old as humanity. It’s never going to stop. People will not perish.”
“The Roads Most Traveled” is among more than 100 films under 30 minutes in length that will be screened virtually during the San Diego International Film Festival’s Shortsfest, which opened Friday and runs through today. Filmmaker panels are also part of the festival. Tickets are $29 per day. sdfilmfest.com/shortsfest