Violeta Went to Heaven

Winner of the World Cinema Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, Violeta Went to Heaven is a poignant biopic of Violeta Parra, a beloved Chilean singer/artist/folklorist who dedicated her life to documenting her country’s traditional music and promoting the “nueva canción,” or “new song,” movement that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. The film doesn’t dwell on Parra’s leftish political leanings, but she became an icon of injustice across Latin America following her suicide in 1967. (110 mins., DCP)

This film is screened in conjunction with the 2013 Summer Institute of MALCS—Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (Women Active in Letters and Social Change)—hosted by Ohio State from July 17 to 20. The theme for the MALCS conference is ¡Aquí Estamos!/We Are Here!: Movements, Migrations, Pilgrimage, and Belonging. Under this theme, the conference brings together students, staff, faculty, and community members from across the country to share scholarship and discussion on social and political movements, historic and contemporary migrations, cultural and economic pilgrimages, and the construction of spaces of belonging in Chicana, Latina, and Native American Studies. Participants will be traveling to Ohio for this event from Illinois, Connecticut, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Florida, North Carolina, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Washington, Utah, Arizona, Texas, California and abroad. The MALCS organization has, for more than thirty years, worked to recruit, retain, support, and promote Chicanas, Latinas, and Native American women in higher education. MALCS publishes the Chicana/Latina Studies Journal featuring scholarship and creative work biannually and also publishes research and commentary in brief on the website Mujeres Talk biweekly. For more information on the conference, visit the conference website.