Why you must-see this film. Because it is an example of the brilliant New Wave of Dominican Cinema. It tackles an incredibly important theme and it is written by the talented team behind ‘Pelo Malo’ (Mariana Rondón, Marité Ugás). Moreover, the film won the Nora Ephron Award at the latest Tribeca Film Festival.
Beautifully juxtaposing the realities and expectations of a young girl approaching womanhood in the Dominican Republic, Boca Chica shines a light on the insidious child sex trade and the lives it seeks to destroy.
Director Gabriella A. Moses exposes the community’s complicity by way of twelve-year-old Desi who is constantly exposed to unwanted advances and crude comments from older men, both visiting and homegrown. She works at the family restaurant alongside her mother Carmen, who encourages the behavior, in a once serene beachside town now bustling with foreign tourists.
Music is Desi’s escape. She dreams of parlaying her nascent musical talents into a full-fledged singing career. When she stumbles across a group of local rappers that set themselves apart from the scene, her passions begin to boil to the surface. She seeks to avoid the common fate of growing mature before her time and falling prey to the morally bankrupt adults in her life who encourage her to forgo her innocence for profit.
Boca Chica explores themes of identity, family, codependency, and truth, and exposes how local social norms present the sexualization of very young girls as a path to survival.
