From Family Lore To Film: Rick Perez On Border Stories, Bias, And Building Community

A child under the table, listening to elders swap stories about migrant camps and survival, grows up to ask a bigger question: who gets to author our history, and what shifts when we do? We sit down with documentary powerhouse Rick Perez to trace the thread from family lore to festival premieres, from Sundance boardrooms to borderlands studios, and from personal risk to collective visibility.

Rick unpacks the two-track life of an independent filmmaker: the creative highs of works like Caesar’s Last Fast and the hard math of sustaining a career when streamers chase celebrity docutainment. From his time at Sundance and the International Documentary Association, he reveals how the language of “excellence” can hide systemic bias, and offers a vivid “second telescope” analogy that explains why stories told by queer, Latinx, and borderland filmmakers don’t repeat the canon—they correct it. We explore Borderland Cinematic Arts, founded by Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra, and how its mission turns local experience into world-class storytelling.

Then we dive into The Four Fs—fighting, fleeing, feeding, and sex—Rick’s new short that probes how primordial drives surface in the lives of gay men. It’s an idea-led film that refuses to sanitize sexuality or fear, inviting honest talk about shame, desire, and adaptation. Rick shares casting choices that center racial, generational, and class diversity, and sketches a bold plan to serialize the concept across communities, from lesbians and trans folks to fundamentalist Christians, mapping how fear shapes behavior and belief.

Along the way, Rick credits Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos for giving him a family of choice and the confidence to merge identities that once felt separate. The takeaway is clear: representation isn’t a luxury—it’s the record that prevents erasure. If you value courageous documentary storytelling, hit play, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find it. Subscribe for future conversations at the intersection of queer life, Latinx culture, and the borderlands.

Chapters

• 0:00 Hosts Introduce Rick Perez
• 2:10 Childhood Stories Spark A Documentarian
• 6:25 Professors And The Documentary Eye
• 10:20 Making Films Versus Making A Living
• 13:05 Sundance, Systems, And Bias
• 18:30 Telescope Analogy For Perspective
• 21:40 Why Tell Cesar Chavez’s Story
• 27:30 Lorena Parley’s Legacy And Rights
• 31:20 Reframing The Film Around The Fast
• 34:20 Borderland Cinematic Arts Mission
• 36:55 Introducing The Four Fs Concept
• 41:10 Casting For Range And Honesty

Transcript

Rita Gonzales: 0:04

Welcome to the Out Agenda, coming to an archive.kpfk.org. I'm Rita Gonzalez. We're going to go into this segment of Radio Q Glue. Welcome to the Radio Q Glue Podcast, the show that takes a deep dive in what the queer, gay, and lesbian Latin community is talking about. I'm Rita Gonzalez. I'm Lydia Otero. I'm Mario J.

Eduardo Archuleta: 0:37

Navar. And I'm Eduardo Archuleta. Today on Radio Q Glue, we welcome Richard Ray Perez, known to many folks as Rick, a powerhouse in documentary filmmaking and media leadership. He currently serves as director of Borderline Studios leading storytelling initiatives centered on the US-Mexico border. Rick previously held leadership roles as executive director of the International Documentary Association, IDA, Director of Acquisition and Distribution Strategies at GBH slash World Channel, and director of creative partnerships at Sundance Institute. As a filmmaker, Rick directed and was executive producer of Caesar's Last Fast, which premiered at Sundance and was named by the New York Times as one of the 20th central films on Latinx experience. He also contributed significantly to brave new films, producing and directing multiple documentary series. Rick is a proud, queer Latinx native of Los Angeles and a Harvard graduate. Rick continues to advocate for representation in media. Today we explore his latest documentary, The Four F's, his creative journey and his experiences building community through storytelling. Rita?

Rita Gonzales: 2:10

Rick, welcome to Radio Q Glue. Now let's start at the beginning. What first drew you to documentary filmmaking?

Rick Perez: 2:18

So I think it was in some ways it found me and I found it. And that source was um stories my aunts used to tell and my mom. So they would come over. I had aunts who lived in the neighborhood in blocks over, and they're much older. My dad was the youngest of like nine kids. And so I had aunts who were in their 70s and 80s when I was a kid, and they would tell these great stories about being migrant farm workers and what that experience was like. And they would tell these stories to my mom or retell them to each other. And I remember when I was a little kid just sitting under the table and listening to these amazing stories. You know, one story was about, you know, my dad shortly after he was born, you know, in some migrant, uh, oh no, this would have been Mexico, because he's born in Mexico, that he was sick and his mother, my grandmother, couldn't breastfeed him. And so what they did was they they uh cleaned a teeth of a goat and had my dad suckle from that goat to get milk. And I was like such a powerful story. And of course, that experience is very different than the house we were living in, which is a house with plumbing, et cetera, in a working class neighborhood in the city of San Fernando in the Northeast Valleys. But it was uh such a powerful image and experience. And there'd be stories like that. My you know, aunts would describe they would arrive at a migrant camp that wouldn't have shelter. And so they would build shelter out of reeds and wood and mud to make walls to give them shelter while they're in those camps. So when I look back at them, like, wow, those stories about these factual lived experiences were fascinating to me. Um, and then there was a pivotal moment in college where I saw a film called Los Olvidados, a famous film by Luis Bunel, and it takes place in the slums of Mexico City. And in one of the scenes I recall inside the home of one of the characters, I thought, oh my God, that looks like my aunt's house in Mexico, you know, and that dirt floor, that's her dirt floor. And these women, they look like people in my extended family. And the bully in the film, a kid named Heibel, looked like this bully down the street who threw a green plum on my at my head and made me cry. And collectively, that well, that first of all, that film itself, I'm like, oh my God, if that is worthy of presenting in the film form, and that was kind of a docudrama, so it was scripted, it wasn't traditional documentary. Somehow my lived experience is worthy of this. And so collectively, that experience I think helped me be inspired by documentary film. And then I had a couple of college professors who were um documentarians, and they were very young at the time. These were the type of guys that just had warm hearts and knew how to uh try to tap into heart as a form of documentary. So one guy was Ross McAlwee, who came from a southern aristocratic family, but recognized that I had the potential to tell stories that may not have been told before. And another guy was a guy named Rob Moss, who was actually from Santa Monica, but he had ended up on the East Coast. And he knew through his lived experience about the Chicano movement that I talked about, that my family was kind of involved in. So they were very nurturing. And it wasn't a formal film school, it was a school that had a filmmaking track that I that you applied to in the interview and and get in, and more kids want to get in than there's space for. But these two professors, you know, allowed me to get in. And by the time I graduated, the um one of the professors, Ross McAlewee, took me aside and said, I think you have the documentary I. I'd encourage you to go into documentary. And um he became a real sort of important figure in the field, an American documentary. And I reflect on back on it. I'm like, oh my God, Ross McAlewee told me I had the documentary I. Now, uh, despite that, or maybe in spite that, I thought, and he's telling me go into documentary. For me, it was like telling somebody, go become a professional poet, right? And I thought that for me is the fast track to poverty. And I don't like I describe sometimes, I grew up poor, I don't want to grow old poor. Uh, so immediately after college, I didn't go into, didn't start making films. I did other media-related jobs. But therein is the kernel of what inspired me in a documentary career during the period of my career when I was making films. And by the way, one of the first films I made was about uh coming out. We had to do a project, a personal documentary for our intermediate class. And it started in the first semester, it started on on how I was like awkward dating or asking women out, et cetera, et cetera. And by the second semester, I developed a crush on somebody who lived in our dorm. And it became a film about me coming out.

Lydia Otero: 7:50

Thanks, Rick, for sharing that. I think we have similar experiences when we were children, in that I tried to listen to the conversations and learn more about my beginnings and about my family. So thank you. Yeah, uh so you have a long history since you uh started working on documentaries. You have a long history on working on some of the most influential or with some of the most influential documentary institutions, including Sundance, IDA, and GBH World Channel. And how have these roles shaped your approach to storytelling?

Rick Perez: 8:34

Sure. So um the just to give you a quick synopsis of sort of the trajectory. So uh as I said, I did a bunch of media jobs outside of college. I worked in a newsroom, I worked at a television network as a technician. Ultimately, those were unfulfilling. And around 2000, there was a kind of a digital revolution in filmmaking where uh you can buy a broadcast quality camera for about 2,000. And I ended up making my first film, which was called Unprecedented about the 2000 presidential election. And that kind of launched a whole series of films that I made that culminated in Caesar's Last Fast, the documentary about Cesar Chavez. Now, by the time I was making Caesar's Last Fast, that took seven years. I realized that for me, the actual making of films was uh not sustainable economically. Realized that uh making independent documentaries and making a living are two different things. Out of my work on the Chavez film, Caesar's Last Fast, I developed a relationship with Sundance Institute, and there was a job opening there, and they hired me to oversee this program. So I pivoted to start supporting uh independent documentary filmmakers through funding, through creative support, designing programs. So there is this part of my career as a maker, and then part of my career doing artist support and granting. And that was particularly fulfilling in a couple of ways. Because I had been a filmmaker, I knew how hard it is to make a film, how difficult to make an independent documentary, to get the funding and to convince the funders your film is worthy, all of that. And once I started working at Sundance, and I kind of knew this already, I knew how difficult it was for filmmakers of color to make films. Um, there are some filmmakers who come from privileged backgrounds and they don't have the same economic pressures, they don't have the same access to uh individual donors and philanthropy. So at Sundance I recognized how, you know, you might say how the sausage is made. There wasn't a total recognition of the systemic bias around funding filmmakers of color. So knowing that, I tried to work within the institute to develop more awareness around that. And of course, you know, sometimes a prestigious institute, very smart, liberal people, they don't want to be told that they're part of a systemic problem or that they're discriminatory in any way. And so there's always this notion around fighting behind excellence. We support excellent films, right? Or if a person of color would come with a film for funding, sometimes the response is, oh, um, we already supported a film about that topic, or that sort of has been told before. And what I uh try to intercept is that story has been told before through white eyes. And so how do we shift the perspective? I developed and applied uh, in some ways, a bigger thinking around the systems of documentaries, storytelling, and nonfiction. And one of the there's an analogy that I started to apply, and it resonated with some or other people. Uh, and it has to do with uh astronomers first applying the telescope. Um, when they applied, got a telescope, they looked at a celestial body, like, oh my God, there's all this detail that's amazing. Uh, but one of the astronomers got the idea of what if you take another telescope, position it someplace else, and focus it and look at that same celestial body. And what they did is they got that, they got much more detail and much more information. And so I said, let's imagine that second telescope around these underserved filmmakers whose stories may have been told before by white people or stories that have not been told, that we are going to get that much more detail and nuance around the larger nonfiction human experience. And that's really sort of one of the discoveries that I made in my work at Sundance.

Rita Gonzales: 13:00

Thank you for sharing that. Rick, this is Rita again. Um, I love your analogies. Yes. It's just there's just the way you say things, you present it, I can see it. So uh thank you for that.

Rick Perez: 13:14

Well, I'm a visual thinker. I you know, I discovered that after college, but it's great.

Rita Gonzales: 13:19

Now, your film, Caesar's Last Fast, was recognized by the New York Times as one of the 20 essential films on the Latinx experience. What inspired you to take on that story?

Rick Perez: 13:32

So it's interesting. Um in some ways it came to me, in some ways, my producer on the film, Molly O'Brien, said that was kind of destined to make the film. Um, so there's the the more indirect inspiration, and then there's the more direct. So I'll start with the indirect inspiration. And this was it was almost a repressed memory that didn't emerge until I started working on the film. So when I was like four or five years old, I was in Head Start in my hometown of San Fernando, California. It's like 1969, 1970. And um Chicano students from Cal State Northridge used to come and volunteer at the Head Start. Because, of course, it was part of the social movement, the uh war against poverty, et cetera. Uh, and of course, and all the kids were little Chicano kids and Mexican kids in my Head Start. And we would get this free lunch uh, you know, as part of the program. And so one day we're sitting down, having this free lunch. Uh, and part of that free lunch was this horrific fruit cocktail, which is bits of fruit and heavy syrup that they should not be serving children, this heavy sugary syrup. So sitting down, having this lunch, and this Chicano student, when it comes to eating his fruit cocktail, I noticed he just casually starts plucking the grapes out of his fruit cocktail. And I was very curious. I'm like, wow, what's going on? So I was like, hey, why are you plucking the grapes out of the fruit cocktail? And he holds up with grape and he said, well, because the people who own the grapefields, they treat the people who pick the grapes horribly. They pay them very little money, they make them live in shacks, they yell at them, and when the people who pick the grapes complain, they fire them. It's like, for this reason, I can't eat these grapes. And he put them aside. And by then, all my classmates at the table were captivated by the story. And I looked down at my grapes and they suddenly became very ugly. And I couldn't eat them either. So I started plucking the grapes out of my fruit cocktail, and the other kids started plucking the grapes out of their fruit cocktail. And so the rest of head start, and all through elementary school, when they would serve us that fruit cocktail, we wouldn't eat the grapes. Now, we didn't know at the time that that was part of a national grape boycott led by Cesar Chavez Dolores Huerta and the UFW. But we'd unknowingly became part of that boycott. So very early on, I had this experience related to the work of Cesar Chavez. Now, fast forward many years later, I was working for um an organization called Brave New Films. Uh, they do a lot of political media. The founder of the company, Robert Greenwald, had mentored me and given me a lot of work and uh helped launch my career when I was doing paid uh filmmaking. And he was thinking of doing um a film about Cesar Chavez. And so we met with uh we met with the members of the Cesar Chavez Foundation, and Robert wanted me to be a producer on the project Robert was going to direct because he knew my background. So we pitched them the idea, they considered it, and part of the process of trying to make a film on that scale is that you want the exclusive rights to make a film about somebody so that there is you're not making you're not competing with somebody else. And so uh Robert was seeking exclusive rights, and then ultimately the um the Chavez Foundation said, well, somebody else has a non-exclusive agreement, a friend of the families, so we can't give you that exclusivity. So Robert dropped the project and kind of went away. And then um a couple weeks later, I get a phone call from I think it was Julie Chavez, uh Julie Chavez Rodriguez. And she says, Hey, Rick, I know I know that Robert's not pursuing the project anymore because the other filmmaker has non-exclusive rights. The other filmmaker is a friend of mine. Are you willing to talk to her about, you know, working on the film or something, or giving her advice? Maybe she could work with Robert. I said, sure, of course. Um, so I get on the phone and uh a woman introduces herself. She's like, hi, I'm Lorena Parley. I've been working on this film for 10 years. I used to volunteer for the UFW. I was um their publicist. And for 10 years I've been trying to make this film, but I've been having trouble raising the money. Um, I only have non-exclusive rights. You know, do you think Robert Greenwald would help maybe produce this project? And by then I knew Robert had moved on to another project that he hired me for. And so I said he's he's no longer interested. And so uh she then said, Well, uh, are you interested in helping me work on this project? Because I could use a producer to help me. Uh and she described what the material she had. She said, I have 85 hours of Chavez-related footage. I have a whole batch, about 16 hours that had never been seen by the public, around a fast he undertook in 1988. I was his publicist, um, so I have all this material. Are you willing to help? And I thought, wow, that sounds like amazing material. Um, so I said, Yeah, totally willing to help. I said, I just started a job for Robert Greenwald, so I'll be available in six months. So in six months I can help out. And she said, uh, Lorraine says, Well, I need somebody to help me now because I'm being treated for breast cancer and I could only work on the film two weeks out of the month. And so I was taken aback, and I'm like, I just got into this contract, but in six months, if you haven't found somebody to help you make this film, I'll help you make this film, just give me a call. I'll work per bono or defer, however, I'll help you make this film. Six months later, I don't hear from her. I'm assuming she found somebody else. About nine months later, I get a phone call from this elderly gentleman and he says, Hi, I'm Lorena Parley's stepfather. Lorena died last month of breast cancer. And she left your name in her notes for us to contact you to see if you'd finish her film. Do you want to finish her film? And at that point, what do you say? And so that's how the film came to me. Um, and it was a whole long process then from that point to actually making the film. It was kind of, it became a mission for somebody I spoke to on the film for maybe an hour and never met in person. Um, but someday I knew it was dedicated to the movement. So then um it took a year for me to then negotiate the rights to use the footage with Lorena's uh stepfather and and mother, and then to then get the rights that Lorena had with the Chavez Foundation transferred to me, and I had a lawyer do that and do that so that I got exclusive rights. So that's how I embarked on this project. Now, when I saw the film that Lorena left behind, um, she left a very, very rough film that she was editing on VHS to VHS film. I looked at it and realized that's a film I'm not sure I can make or I can finish. It was the type of traditional documentary with a narrator and what I call, and hopefully it doesn't sound too disparaging, but I would call it a video textbook that was structured chronologically from the times he was born to his death. And when I started looking at the footage, I remember popping in a tape that said something like, you know, day one. And I pop in the tape, and then there's a very dramatic press conference with Martin Sheen and um uh Luis Valdez and uh other you know figures, James Edward James Owen's. And it says, we're here today, the press is there, season's gone on this fast um because of the use of pesticides. We're here to draw attention to the use of pesticides, we're here to support him and to announce Caesar's fasting. And then I pop in the next tape, and it's like a few days later, and it's more dramatic. So they're announcing we don't know how long Caesar's gonna fast. Um, it could go on indefinite. He was then 61 years old, could affect his health. And as I saw that sequence of tapes, I saw a very dramatic escalating tension and conflict with suspense around when will Caesar end this fast? Will it, you know, could it kill him? You know, will his health be affected? So immediately I saw a different film structured around Caesar's 1988 fast. And I went back to Lorena's family and I said, I see a different film. Um, I can't make the film she was planning to make. Will you support me making the film I see? Um and so they thought about it for a week or two and and let me make the film that I saw.

Eduardo Archuleta: 22:50

Uh I'm Edward, and uh you're now the director at Borderland Cinematic Arts. Can you tell us a little bit more about the studio's mission and your vision for it?

Rick Perez: 23:02

Sure. So Borderland Cinematic Arts was founded by two very talented Latina and Latino filmmakers, Alex Rivera and Cristina Ivada, who are MacArthur Fellows, also known as MacArthur geniuses. So they were offered positions at Arizona State as uh professors, and they accept positions on the condition that they would be allowed to start an academic center that is Borderland Cinematic Arts. They were um, they accepted the position on the condition that they would be able to start an academic center called Borderlands Cinematic Arts. Borderland Cinematic Arts is a space where world-class filmmakers create films anchored in the social, political, and cultural experience of the borderlands. Um, we do that by supporting mid-career filmmakers uh telling stories in that space. And we also uh program public events around independent filmmaking focused on the borderlands. So, as I said, Alex and Christina founded it. And after I left IDA, they helped me um launch it and really sort of drive the mission and help execute the mission. Um, so it I have to say it's really their vision, and I'm there to support their vision. Um, but what I bring to it is the experience of having created artist programs in my other jobs uh to ensure that the programs we launch are effective and and kind of meet our goals within this this um this mission.

Mario J. Novoa: 24:41

Thank you. This is Mario. Uh let's dive into your latest project, the four F's. What inspired the documentary and what are its core themes?

Rick Perez: 24:54

So there are two points of inspiration for the four F's. There's the sort of the bigger, broader idea around um around behavior. And so when I was in college, I took a class in what was then the emerging field of uh evolutionary uh sociology. Or so um there was uh um there were fields of the social sciences that were starting to um take in and work with the ideas presented in in evolution and specifically human evolution. And so there are these young academics who were working at the intersection of sociology and and evolution in this emerging field, and part of that field branched off into what we now call evolutionary psychology.

Lydia Otero: 25:45

Can you share with us a little bit more about what the four Fs is?

Rick Perez: 25:50

So the four Fs is a short film about how primordial behaviors express themselves in the lives of gay men. And it's based on a concept in evolutionary psychology that all behavior necessary for survival and adaptation comes down to four expressions, and that is fighting, fleeing, feeding, and sex, the four F's that's where the idea came from. And I always fascinated by what motivates human behavior. So, you know, I've always pondered that as I've gone through the world like, why do we do what we do on an individual micro scale and on a larger societal scale that creates systems of oppression or systems of empathy and support, etc. When I worked at the IDA, um, it was a very difficult transition to come in as the executive director. There was strong opposition by some of the senior staff there. And what I saw was the senior staff retreating into a place of fear, fear of change, fear of this whole unknown. And it ended up becoming a very disruptive relationship that then led out into the larger independent documentary field and was written about in some of the trades. And so ultimately, that position, because of this disruption, it was not tenable for me. So I left the job after 18 months. And I caused to reflect on where was where did that disruption come from? And it came from the sense of fear and a sense of needing to fight. And so I wanted to examine um that through storytelling. And um I thought, well, why don't I focus on a specific demographic group? What does the four F's look like and how do they manifest themselves in the lives of gay men? Uh so Mario, as one of the producers, and my husband Gary Thompson, we talked to 23 some odd men to get a range of races, ethnicities, and ages to see who is comfortable talking about how the four Fs manifest in their life. And so what's emerging out of that is uh a short documentary called The Four F's. And that's my latest project, but also my venture back into filmmaking. So the last film I made was Caesar's Last Fast in 2014, and we're on the verge of completing the four F's. It's it's an interesting, difficult film because unlike my other films, which are very story-based, like there's a sequence of events that lead somewhere. This is a film that's kind of inspired and enveloped, and everything is connected by an idea, which is a different kind of structure.

Lydia Otero: 28:54

I'm uh so fascinated by the four Fs. I can see how interesting it would be to interview all those gay men that you mentioned. You said like 30 of them.

Rick Perez: 29:08

So um we interviewed 30, but ultimately we cast like 15 or 13 or 15, something like that. Yeah.

Lydia Otero: 29:16

How did you decide who to cast?

Rick Perez: 29:18

Um, so our casting was based on uh the participants' ability to tell us a story and their comfort level telling us a story. But also we wanted a range of lived experiences. So we are very aware of uh racial and ethnic background and age diversity. And to the extent that we can cast for class background, we also took that into um into account. And this is, of course, coming out of, although I already had a sense of like the need for the diverse voices that I expressed, you know, with the the telescope analogy, but it's also coming out of the the George. Floyd and Black Lives Era, where there's this intense uh focus and awareness, a blossoming of awareness around the myopic lens through which we had been hearing most storytelling. So, of course, we wanted to help dismantle that primarily white middle class lens. And it's particularly, you know, uh a lot of gay themed films have been told through the lens of white men. Um, so again, we were we were very aware of that. So that informed uh our decisions on who to uh ultimately interview, speak to.

Lydia Otero: 30:38

Great. And so then I mean, you're talking about these issues uh that are so important um to different generations, right? People of my generation and and certainly of Madio's generation.

Rick Perez: 30:53

I mean, one thing I wanted uh to embrace is particularly male sexuality. And the reality is that male sexuality is, we can say, robust, and it's a complicated situation, particularly of men of men of color, because our sexuality and homosexuality can be a source of shame. But of course, it's a natural function and in fact a necessary scientific function around uh when it comes to evolution. Now, gay men, because historically, we don't procreate a whole nuanced interpretation on the evolutionary value of homosexuality. We can go into that in a bit, but no, not at all. I try to approach storytelling and my thinking uh with a sense of fearlessness and not trying to whitewash stuff. And that includes not trying to self-censor. In nonfiction storytelling and uh documentary storytelling, the power of it is that you can arrive at a place of knowledge and passing along knowledge. But if you're filtering and self-censoring or worried about what the public would think, and that's that's a hurdle to trying to get at uh some fundamental truths. So some people like, oh, we don't want to show our dirty laundry, gay men having sex or being, you know, what we might call judgmentally hypersexual. You know, no, no, men have sex, men are sexual, you know, and they're often granted unhealthy expressions of sexuality. But the reality is that we are sexual beings, and I don't want to um deny that. In fact, I'm curious about examining that.

Lydia Otero: 32:50

Great. So you're the expert and has worked in the documentary industry. Uh, do you think you'll face challenges in the future regarding its distribution?

Rick Perez: 33:01

Well, right now it's very difficult for independent documentary to find distribution in general, because the the um the industry has contracted. Um, so there was a time when during the rise of the streamers, when they discovered, oh my God, documentary filmmaking is great, they were acquiring all these independent documentaries. Caesar's Last Fast was acquired for three years by Netflix, etc. Um, and then we are getting paychecks and great. Now that model, they spent too much money on that model. And between spending too much money and discovering, wait, we can make our own documentaries for cheaper. Um, the opportunities for independent films to get acquired by the streamers just disappeared. Then they also discovered, oh, we know what people are watching, how long we're watching, right? Because we have the metrics on Netflix, they know when you stop watching, they know what you watch, they know what you watch till the end. And these and they recognize oh, people want to watch mass audiences that get more subscribers, what we call docutainment. That is celebrity documentaries and true crime. So that really skews and that's sadly informing mostly what's out there now. So it's within that universe that we are releasing the four F's, which on top of like being an independent documentary, it's a short film. It's like 25 minutes. So I have no idea what the distribution potential is for it. Uh, but in some ways, I didn't make it for that. I made it out of curiosity and exploration uh around how primordial behaviors manifest in the lives of gay men. And what I hope to do, if there are any funders out there listening, is serialize it. Because how do the four Fs manifest in the lives of lesbians, of transgender people, of fundamentalist Christians? Um, not only in the film do we examine the four F's, fear isn't a four F, but fear is underlying all the four F's. We've very taught uh explicitly talked about what are the deepest fears of some of the persons participating in the film. So we really go deep into what are the fears of these uh multi-generational gay men. But also, wouldn't it be curious to see what are the fears of lesbians, of transgender people, of fundamentalist Christians? How does that inform their behavior, their biases, etc.? How might that inform changing behavior, self-awareness?

Lydia Otero: 35:44

Thank you, Rick. I'm so excited about the four Fs. I mean, I can't wait.

Eduardo Archuleta: 35:49

It's Edwardloo again. And just wanted to bring up that you have a history with gay and lesbian Latinos Unidos. Can you share what that meant for you, both professionally and personally, to be a part of Glue and among the other gay and lesbian Latina leaders and creators?

Rick Perez: 36:09

I am blessed to have found Glue at an important part of my life. So um, from the Los Angeles area, and after I went to school outside of Boston, after I graduated from college, I had come out of the closet, had a boyfriend who followed me out uh here to LA. And I had a very strong identity as a Chicano uh and a Latino, uh, but I had an entirely different separate identity as a gay man. And so the gay people I knew in college were largely white, although I did have a very good friend who was from Wilmington, who was half Chicano and half Filipino, uh, and a lesbian from uh from college who was from Inglewood, but it wasn't part of a broader community. We're part of this larger white community of gay people. Ultimately, and rightly so, my boyfriend left me, and I was alone without support and community. And I trying to remember how I found glue. But I remember showing up to a meeting, and there was this whole community of smart, beautiful Latino, les Latino lesbians and gay men that, like, wow, these are my people. It was an intersection of that of identities that up to that point had been separate. So that I sort of described myself as second Jan Glue, um, because I came in after the founders, you know, had did a lot of work. Rita was still involved, but um, you know, at the time, uh, the active members was Ron Gutierrez, Jose Hernandez, uh, Valentino Sandoval, who all became very close friends and inspirations. But like many people experienced in Glue, they became my family of choice. And they taught me how to merge my both of my identities in a healthy affirmative way, but completely enriching and experience and owe that experience to uh to my friends in Glue who became not only friends in this movement that were doing actual work, and of course the blossoming of that work has been a stad, but also uh creating family in and way before we were traditionally accepted by our our birth families. So I think the first glue meeting I attended was I'm gonna guess 90 91 or 92.

Mario J. Novoa: 38:37

This is Mario again, as a queer Latin filmmaker, what advice do you have for the next generation of storytellers from underrepresented communities?

Rick Perez: 38:48

So I used to think that documentary filmmaking and nonfiction filmmaking was uh an optional luxury. You do it if you can, if you could afford it, etc. What I come to believe is that actually it's necessary. Because it's necessary to be part of the larger global human narrative. And unless we're creating and telling these stories, our stories from our point of view will go untold and we'll be unseen. And they will, you know, right now we're living in a period period of erasure. We won't even have the stories to be erased. So what I would tell them is what you're doing is a necessary practice to capturing our version of the human experience, which is just as valid as everybody else's. And so you have to do it. Now it is very hard to do it. As I said, making uh independent documentaries and making a living are two different things. And what I've learned uh on the institutional side when I've worked at places like Sundance and the International Documentary Association is that there are more valid films worthy of getting funding than there are funds available. So the demand exceeds the supply. So how do you have that persistence to keep making a film if you're under-resourced or not resourced at all? So there's a challenge in that and a conundrum. But the bottom line is it must be done if we are to be heard, seen, and to capture the value that we give to the broader human and lived experience.

Rita Gonzales: 40:37

What does the future hold for you? How do people follow your work?

Rick Perez: 40:43

Wow. So um, I have no idea what the future holds for me. And I'm learning to be okay with that. Oh, people follow me. You know, I'm not on social media, right? I mean, I have a couple accounts, I monitor them, you know, and sort of, but I'm not actively in that dialogue. So the best way to connect with me and my work is to watch Caesar's Last Vass on Apple TV Plus. That's the best way. And in some ways, I think, as far, and this is my subjective judgment, that right now I think that's the most significant contribution I've made to the documentary film world and to our community of Latinos and Chicanos and Chicanos. And that in some ways I'm just proud of that story. And somebody told me, as the New York Times recognized, and uh somebody told me this uh that I'd made the definitive documentary about Cesar Chavez. I'm like, how flattering. That was created by a gay man at Chicano, that I got the blessing and the luxury to to do that and share that. So my advice is the best way to follow me is to watch Caesar's Last Fast on Apple TV Plus.

Mario J. Novoa: 41:56

We'd like to thank our guest Rick Betis, who was on our show today. My name is Mario J. Navoa. I'm Lidiotero. I'm Eduardo Archuleto.

Rita Gonzales: 42:05

And I'm Rita Gonzalez. Radio Q Glue is a segment of the Out Agenda. And we want to hear from you. You can like us on our Facebook page or email us at the outagenda at gmail.com, or you can visit our website on BuzzFroute under Radio QGlue or the Glue Archives. Thanks for listening and have a wonderful week. And remember that being out is the first step to being equal. Now stay tuned for this way out.