Synopsis

East LA Interchange tells the story of working-class, immigrant Boyle Heights, the oldest neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Targeted by government policies, real estate laws, and California planners, this quintessential immigrant neighborhood survived racially restrictive housing covenants, Japanese-American Internment, Federal redlining policies, lack of political representation, and the building of the largest and busiest freeway interchange system in the nation, the East L.A. Interchange. The documentary explores how the freeways – a symbol of Los Angeles ingrained in America’s popular imagination – impact Boyle Heights’ residents: literally, as an environmental hazard and structural blockade and figuratively, as a conversational interchange about why the future of their beloved community should matter to us all.

Boyle Heights was once one of the most sustainably diverse, multicultural areas in the United States. A 1954 article in Fortnight declared, “Few districts in America are as ethnically dynamic, politically tolerant, and community-proud…” East LA Interchange charts Boyle Heights’ evolution from multiethnic to predominately Latino as this still tolerant and community-proud neighborhood becomes a cradle of Mexican-American history and culture in the U.S. We see the neighborhood’s political activism from its early multiracial days blossoming with Boyle Heights resident Edward Roybal’s election as the first Latino in the twentieth century to the L.A. City Council and to Congress from California.

East LA Interchange presents a complex picture of issues Boyle Heights’ residents have faced through the years such as access to education, gang violence, immigration policies, environmental pollution and gentrification. A recent New York Times article on the neighborhood used the term “gentefication” referring to young Latinos returning to Boyle Heights to invest in local businesses: “(Gentefication) has provided a jolt of energy and a transfusion of money, but it has also created friction with working-class residents here. And tensions over just whom this neighborhood belongs to are a clear sign that Latinos have come of age in Los Angeles.”

The question of whether an evolving Boyle Heights can preserve its unique culture and history along with a desire to create new opportunities for its residents is one that many communities throughout the country are currently facing. In East LA Interchange, NYU historian John Kuo Wei Tchen says, “Places like Boyle Heights are literally on the cutting edge of what this country is becoming. It’s not based on making more money, moving further and further away from other people. It’s based on the new kinds of social relationships that can happen in a mixed and mingled kind of community that really makes up the promise of what this country should be about.”

East LA Interchange tells the story of how one neighborhood found its political voice in its fight against the largest freeway interchange system in the nation. Though there are different issues today, these activist residents are still organizing and speaking out for their rights as a working-class, immigrant, community of color. The film asks if Boyle Heights as we know it will survive the next round of challenges from environmental pollution, industrialization, development and gentrification. East LA Interchange provides a compelling look at what the future of America can be if communities like Boyle Heights work together to secure our nation’s pledge of providing justice for all.

Click to read: This Film Is a Fascinating History of Boyle Heights' Cultural Mix, LA Weekly

Filmmakers

Betsy Kalin - Producer / Director / Research and Writer

Betsy Kalin formed Itchy Bee Productions in 1997, a full service production and distribution company specializing in high-quality films that entertain, educate and inspire. She received a BA in Women’s Studies from Columbia University and an MFA in Directing from the University of Miami. In 2004, her feature length documentary, Hearts Cracked Open, premiered to great acclaim at the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival and has gone on to win several awards. Her film, Roof, premiered at New York City’s MoMA as part of New Directors/New Films and is on the Short Shorts compilation. She produced Before Homosexuals with John Scagliotti, the Emmy award-winning producer of Before Stonewall, and she also researched and directed "Of Revolutionaries and Pioneers" for WGBY/WGBH in Massachusetts. In 2010 she made Chained!, a short documentary that screened in festivals around the world, and last year premiered the award-winning Click on the festival circuit.

Eric Waterman - Executive Producer

Eric Waterman is the co-founder of Bluewater Media Group. In addition, he produces business projects in the Los Angeles area including several restaurants and an addiction treatment center. Eric has an unmitigated passion for photography and has exhibited his work in many galleries over the years. As a native Los Angelino, Eric is proud that his parents lived in Boyle Heights in the 1930s and 1940s.

Christine Louise Mills – Producer / Editor / Writer

Christine Louise Mills is a film and television editor as well as the founding artistic director of Smart Gals Productions, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to creating unique events throughout Los Angeles. She holds a BA in Theater Arts from UC San Diego where she was featured in the films of Babette Mangolte and Eleanor Antin, and a MFA in Film Production from the USC School of Cinematic Arts with a dual emphasis in screenwriting and editing. Film projects range from narrative fiction to documentary: Adam (First Look Festival Silver Prize winner, spring 2010), Penny and Charlie (New Filmmakers New York, 2010), The Mischievous Case of Miss Cordelia Botkin (Los Angeles International Women’s Film Festival, 2011), and Where Life Is (Kate Amend, A.C.E., faculty mentor; Oxford Film Festival, honorable mention). Television credits include Junk Gypsies (HGTV) as well as Hairy Bikers (BBC/History Channel). Her literary and performance work through Smart Gals Productions has been featured in the LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times Magazine, High Performance, Bitch magazine, Another Angle on L.A./AFAR, and Pacifica Radio’s KPFK.

Vanessa Luna Bishop - Producer

Vanessa Luna Bishop was born and raised in City Terrace and Boyle Heights. She is an entrepreneur, writer and academic of the arts. She received her M.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at California State University Northridge, her B.A. at Occidental College in English and Comparative Literature with a minor in Visual Arts, and graduated in Theatre at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. At age 7, Vanessa had the privilege of presenting Anthony Quinn with a flower in honor of renaming the Belvedere Library to the Anthony Quinn Library, site of his childhood home in Boyle Heights.

Gretchen Warthen - Cinematographer

Gretchen Warthen has worked as a director of photography, director, lead director, and camera operator in television and film for fifteen years. She was awarded two Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Certificates of Recognition for her contribution as the Director of Photography for NBC’s Starting Over Season 1 and Season 2. She received the Northwest Broadcasters Award of Excellence in Journalism for the documentary, Fantasy of the Gem, and won the Olympia Film Festival with the documentary, Hate: An Autobiography. She has worked as a DP and operator on Showtime's The Real L Word, the award-winning feature Hannah Free, A&E;’s Hands on History: Caskets, History House: Seattle Children’s Television History, TBS's Survivors of the Holocaust: Seattle Survivors, The Apprentice, and Project Greenlight.

LA
LA
LA