Vanessa: Her Love Story Subtitles English __TOP__

Set in New York City, the story begins in 1990 with a 20-year-old dancer named Aurora Ponce de León (Sara Maldonado). She attends New York School of the Arts with her two best friends, Natalia Suárez (Talina Duclaud) and Vanessa Miller (Vanessa Pose). One night after a dance rehearsal, they all go to a bar, where Aurora meets Lorenzo Lobos (Eugenio Siller), a dance instructor and single father. Aurora and Lorenzo fall madly in love but Vanessa, who had always been jealous of Aurora, is infuriated by this because she is also in love with Lorenzo. She tries everything to separate them, going as far as inviting Lorenzo to Aurora's lavish twentieth birthday party (Lorenzo was unaware that Aurora was wealthy), where she makes sure he sees Federico (Ismael La Rosa) kiss Aurora. Lorenzo storms off, believing that he has been betrayed. Aurora runs after Lorenzo and declares her love for him, but it doesn't work and Lorenzo wants nothing more to do with Aurora.

Vanessa: Her Love Story subtitles English

When 20-year-old Vanessa Guill\u00e9n went missing from her military base at Fort Hood in 2020 after reporting sexual assault, Karina Lopez was angry. Lopez, an Army veteran, decided to tell her story on social media: She had been assaulted while stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, two years earlier. \n\n\n\n\u201cThis isn\u2019t just a one-time thing,\u201d Lopez said in a new Univision News documentary that premiered Thursday. \u201cI reported it, and I fought. I\u2019ve gone through the trauma and the retaliation that I faced, and now you have a missing soldier that was sexually harassed. I put my picture beside Vanessa\u2019s and wrote my story.\u201d \n\n\n\nShe ended her post with a hashtag: #IamVanessaGuillen. Her story went viral, and thousands of women from different generations, stations and ranks spoke up about their own experiences and demanded change \u2014 a movement that is now at the heart of the documentary, named after Lopez\u2019s hashtag. \n\n\n\nGuill\u00e9n\u2019s remains were eventually found near a river about 20 miles from the base. Investigators detained a fellow soldier suspected of beating her to death, but he shortly escaped and fatally shot himself. Separately, about one year later, officials determined that she had been harassed by a different soldier.\n\n\n\n The documentary centers on Lopez, who left Fort Hood one month before Guill\u00e9n went missing. In an exclusive interview with The 19th, Andrea Pati\u00f1o Contreras, the director of the film, spoke about the resilience of survivors of military sexual violence and their efforts to reform the justice system and reclaim their lives. \n\n\n\nThis interview has been edited for length and clarity.\n\n\n\n(Courtesy of Univision)\n\n\n\nMariel Padilla: Can you tell me the exact moment when you knew that you were going to make this documentary \u2014 and what led you there?\n\n\n\nAndrea Pati\u00f1o Contreras: When the Vanessa Guill\u00e9n case happened in 2020, my colleague David Adams [at Univision News] was reporting a lot on that and through that reporting, another case came to us: Karina\u2019s case. I hadn\u2019t worked with military issues before, but I had a lot of experience working on gender and sexual violence. I flew down to see Karina in late 2020 and very quickly realized this is a story we had to tell. I was struck by her clarity; she\u2019s very articulate and self-aware. She was especially disturbed by what happened to Vanessa; she knew it could have been her. Karina was able to communicate a lot of things that I have never heard someone say the way she explained it \u2014 the way she was experiencing PTSD, very complicated emotional states.\n\n\n\nI came back from that initial trip feeling like there was a very important story there. At that point, it was very clear to me that we were going to make a documentary. For the most part, I was doing short docs \u2014 anywhere from five to 15 minutes. We actually published a short story, about five minutes, on Karina\u2019s case in January 2021. But we continued talking and reporting, we interviewed Protect Our Defenders, requested access to visit Fort Hood and visited the Guill\u00e9n family. We also started meeting more people and survivors whose stories I thought were great, and I wanted to include a couple of people that represent an older generation that didn\u2019t feel like they could speak. I was like, \u2018OK, this is clearly a longer piece.\u2019\n\n\n\n\n\nFrom gaining military access and investigating classified documents to navigating a pandemic, the reporting for this film couldn\u2019t have been easy. What kinds of challenges did you face during the process?\n\n\n\nAfter that first meeting with Karina in 2020, I went down again and started filming a little bit with her and her family. She told me the interviews and cameras were overwhelming and emotionally draining. She wanted to keep filming but didn\u2019t know when she would be ready again. I told her I could wait as long as she needed, and we stayed in touch for the next few months.\n\n\n\nIn the meantime, during the first part of 2021, we requested access to Fort Hood and actually surprisingly got it fairly easily. At that point, the independent review committee had just released a few months before their findings. I think they were very much under the eye of everyone and wanted to give access to people. So we requested the maximum kind of access we could get, which was three full days, and talked to as many people as we could. Still, accessing substantial information or getting specific answers about individual cases was really difficult, if not impossible. \n\n\n\nBy the summertime, Karina said she was ready for me to come back. She was dealing with pretty intense PTSD and after a few days of filming, she was drained again. There was a lot of negotiation and really open conversations \u2014 it was a very interesting, new and challenging filmmaking process for me. I grew and learned the importance of trauma-informed reporting. You can\u2019t rush a story like this. \n\n\n\nThe documentary is in English but will have Spanish subtitles. While directing, who did you imagine would one day be your audience? \n\n\n\nWith Univision, our audience is primarily Latino, and that\u2019s a really important population for the Army as it\u2019s the fastest-growing. It\u2019s important that the Latino community see, but it\u2019s also become clear that this project has resonated with a lot of veterans. In some ways that speaks to Karina\u2019s viral post: There are so many people who have gone through similar experiences. People crave a sense of community, and I\u2019ve noticed that a lot of veterans are excited and want to see the film because there\u2019s something very powerful about when you realize that you\u2019re not alone. \n\n\n\nUltimately, we would like for the film to be seen by not only military or military-adjacent people \u2014 but anyone, anyone who might learn and understand something new. \n\n\n\nIn this frame from the #IAmVanessaGuillen Documentary, candles the ground at a memorial for Vanessa Guillen.\n (Courtesy of Univision)\n\n\n\nWhen you\u2019re working on a long-term project like this, things are constantly changing. There was an independent investigation into Fort Hood\u2019s command, the annual defense bill was modified and lawmakers pushed for further military justice reform. How did you know that the documentary was done? \n\n\n\nI don\u2019t know that you ever know that you\u2019re done. I think I could have edited more. I could have done different things, but at some point I had to close this story. It was definitely really hard to keep track of all the changes in legislation and also trying to strike a balance between explaining that information as accurately and nuanced as possible and not being too information-heavy. \n\n\n\nThere are some universal themes that are probably not going to go away in the military any time soon. Obviously, this is still happening. Culture doesn\u2019t change overnight, so those things will remain relevant unfortunately. I don\u2019t know if there was ever a point that it felt like filming the documentary was over because we honestly could have kept going. But we had to make that call. \n\n\n\n\n\nWhat do you hope people take away from the documentary?\n\n\n\nI hope it can be used as an educational tool, one that the military might be able to use in training and reform at a higher level. I would also love to have community screenings, so that it helps further change in whatever way that may be. \n\n\n\nOn a personal level, I\u2019m a survivor myself with sexual assault under completely different circumstances. In my case, my perpetrators were arrested and went to jail and were prosecuted. I have always known that that\u2019s such a rarity, but this reporting gave me a deeper understanding of what justice means and what that can do to you, your mental health and your physical health \u2014 or the lack thereof. I have a much more profound understanding of what justice gives you, and we\u2019re denying so many people that right. \n\n\n\nI hope people watch \u201c#IamVanessaGuillen\u201d and demand changes from these institutions that have for so long not been held accountable. There is hope at an institutional level and at an individual level. So many of these women have faced tremendous obstacles but have been able to find the tools to have a fulfilling, happy life. And that\u2019s true for Karina. She doesn\u2019t want this terrible thing to define her.\n","post_title":"Latina veterans saw themselves in Vanessa Guill\u00e9n. A new documentary tells their stories.","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"vanessa-guillen-documentary-latina-military-sexual-assault-survivors","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2023-03-22 13:51:37","post_modified_gmt":"2023-03-22 18:51:37","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"https:\/\/19thnews.org\/?p=42375","menu_order":0,"post_type":"post","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"},"authors":["name":"Mariel Padilla","slug":"mariel-padilla","taxonomy":"author","description":"Mariel Padilla is a general assignment reporter. Previously she covered breaking news at The New York Times where she contributed to COVID-19 coverage that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize, compiled data at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and contributed to a 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning project at The Cincinnati Enquirer.","parent":0,"count":178,"filter":"raw","link":"https:\/\/19thnews.org\/author\/mariel-padilla"]} Up Next Military 041b061a72