This is a Women’s Voices Now Production: not Quite Here, not Quite There is a production of Girls’ Voices Now, a Women’s Voices Now Summer Youth Program focused on empowering the next generation of women and femme-identifying activists, filmmakers, and feminists.
not Quite Here, not Quite There Synopsis
Media representations of immigrants dehumanize the people they portray. not Quite Here, not Quite There is a visual companion to a poem written by Diana Peña, focusing on the undocumented experience.
About the Youth Filmmakers
Diana Peña (16 years old) is a high school student and storyteller who enjoys presenting stories regardless of medium. She immigrated from Mexico when she was 3 and grew up in the humming streets of Boyle Heights. Cared for by a single mother in a small home with seven others, she has worked as a janitor alongside her mother at Boyle Heights Beat where she learned about the Girls’ Voices Now program. She has recently taken to screenwriting, and her hobbies include writing online fanfiction, styling and clothes altering.
Emily Ponce (14 years old) is a freshman with a keen interest in volleyball. She also volunteers at Cedar Sinai Hospital and California Hospital, where she learns about opportunities that were not given to her parents, who made many sacrifices to immigrate to the United States. She hopes to become a therapist to give back to her parents and community.
Kianna Teachout (18 years old) is a Sophomore Intermedia major at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, where she was the recipient of the Bridgetown and CSSA Scholarships. She is an alumni of the Oxbow School of Art, the California State Summer School for the Arts, Ryman Arts, and the CalArts Community Arts Partnership.
She is a member of GetLit, and has participated in multiple GetLit Classic Slams, as well as the annual Henry-Camp Blair Shakespeare Festival at Chapman University. She is a published poet who is featured in the 2019 anthology, This Moment: Bold Voices from WriteGirl. She is an activist, writer, actor, visual artist, and is a lover of literature and film.
More from the Filmmakers
To learn more about this film, relevant resources, and the call to action, please visit the film page, here.
