Cine Casual: Charlotte’s First Latino Film Festival – Charlotte Magazine

Growing up in Puerto Rico, Giovanna Torres and her parents went to the movies often. But despite the island’s Spanish heritage, proximity to Latin America, and dual national languages, Torres says the only movies available were English-language Hollywood films. “Maybe they had Spanish subtitles,” she says, “but that was it.” It wasn’t until she attended a liberal arts college in Connecticut that she was introduced to Latin American cinema in a class. “I was mind-blown,” she says. “I was like, How have I never seen these films?”

Even though film budgets in Latin America are “minuscule compared to those from Hollywood,” Torres says, “filmmakers create these beautiful, exciting, daring, groundbreaking films. They’re almost like acts of resistance. The stories are original, very ours, very idiosyncratic—yet universal.”

Connecticut’s proximity to New York City meant that Torres could easily access the Latino films she wanted to see. She had a choice of premieres every weekend.

But when Torres and her then-boyfriend, Alex Piñeres, moved to Charlotte in 2015 in search of warmer weather, they found that Latin American cinema was practically nonexistent here, Torres says. A few local theaters brought in foreign films—Park Terrace Stadium before 2017 and the Manor Theatre, which closed in 2020—but they were rarely Latin American. When the couple wanted to see one, they had to stream it. 

Charlotte’s lack of options didn’t make sense to Torres. She and Piñeres had selected Charlotte because of its booming Latino community. Latinos were the region’s fastest-growing ethnic group, with a 50% increase between 2010 and 2020.

So Torres, now 32, brought Latin American film to Charlotte herself. Her project, called Cine Casual, started in 2016 as a blog. But with dedication, arts grants, and Piñeres, now her husband, she expanded it into a recurring film series and, this month, Charlotte’s first Latino film festival. 

During Torres’ senior year of high school in Puerto Rico, her English teacher saw her potential and encouraged her to apply to colleges “on the mainland.” She attended the University of Connecticut from 2009 to 2013, where she met Piñeres and earned an individualized degree in public relations and Latino studies. 

A couple of years after graduation, Torres and Colombian-born Piñeres grew tired of the Northeast’s cold winters, and Torres found an agency job in Charlotte as an account executive for Latino clients. “Media makes working for an agency look so glamorous,” Torres says. “But a few months in, I thought, This is not what I thought it would be.”

She quit, and the couple got by on Piñeres’ income from his job as an academic advisor at Central Piedmont Community College while Torres tried to figure out what she wanted to do next. 

“I felt drained,” Torres tells me over coffee in downtown Huntersville, near her home. “I felt like I had no creativity, no inspiration left in me.” 

But she also had time to do new things—like start a blog, Cine Casual, to share information about Latin American movie releases, including where to stream them. “It was really just meant to be a resource,” she says. “I imagined there had to be other people like me who are trying to find these films in places where they aren’t easily accessible.”

The time off got Torres’ “creative juices flowing,” Piñeres says. “It was good for both of us, because we started to feed off of each other’s energy and creativity.”

Six months after she quit the agency, Torres took a job as the Arts & Science Council’s marketing and communications coordinator, then its marketing manager. But she still spent her nights and weekends on Cine Casual, which was steadily growing an audience. In 2017, with Piñeres now pitching in, Cine Casual began to include diverse content about Latin American film, like interviews from festivals the couple attended, opinion pieces about movies they watched, and Q&As with filmmakers.

Around 2019, Torres and Piñeres began to brainstorm how to turn Cine Casual into something beneficial for the Charlotte community. That same year, the Knight Foundation announced its Celebrate Charlotte Arts initiative, which offered $200,000 grants to arts projects that showcased “the spirit of the city.”

Torres had never written a grant application before, but she pitched an idea: to host community film showings of six Latino films. Her application joined a pile of more than 200 others, only 14 of which would be chosen. 

Months later, Torres was driving home from work when she got a phone call from the Knight Foundation. They had accepted her application. “I just started crying,” she says.

In January 2020, Cine Casual held its first film screening in a small room at Camp North End, for a 2018 Colombian film called Matar a Jesús. Torres also got the filmmaker, Laura Mora, to send a video message to share with the audience. She served snacks from Manolo’s Bakery in east Charlotte and hosted an afterparty at McFly Printing. 

“It was amazing, because we honestly thought there was a need—a want—for what we were doing, but we didn’t know what was going to happen. But we had a line out the door, and we had to turn people away,” Torres says. “I don’t want to sound cliché, but it just felt like it was meant to be. Everything worked out in our favor. I was so nervous because it was our first event, but, I don’t know, it just—it felt like a family. Everyone was so gracious and so happy to be there.”

Torres and Piñeres hosted three more screenings before COVID shut the world down in March and forced them to screen the remaining two films virtually. Each year since 2022, Cine Casual has secured funding from various Charlotte arts organizations to continue to host an annual film series. Each has featured six films—of different genres and from different countries, some of them East Coast premieres. 

In early 2020, Piñeres became programs manager for the Levine Museum of the New South.  He’s since realized how atypical Cine Casual attendees are. “It’s not very often that arts offerings bring in a mix of not only race and ethnicity but also age,” he says. “But we’ve seen such a diverse mix of people at our screenings.”

In the past couple of years, Cine Casual has also collaborated with Reel Out Charlotte, the annual LGBTQ film festival, and with the Charlotte Film Festival, hosted by nonprofit Charlotte Film Society. Cine Casual was the first organization to screen a film at The Independent Picture House in NoDa in June 2022. That was more than two years after Charlotte’s previous independent arthouse theater, the Manor, had closed. “When you step back,” Torres says, “that’s part of Charlotte history.” 

This month, Cine Casual will make another mark on Charlotte history. It will host Charlotte’s first Latino film festival, screening around a dozen films over two long weekends, April 4-7 and April 12-14, at the IPH. Other festival activities include conversations with creators, community leaders, and artists; hands-on art activities; and more. 

While Cine Casual has volunteers to help run events, it’s still just Torres and Piñeres running the show. Last year, Torres quit her full-time job to give more time to Cine Casual. (She also works part time as a marketing contractor.) Piñeres still works full time at the Levine Museum but pitches in on nights, weekends, and event days.

Torres says she hopes the festival will establish a long-standing “safe space” for Latinos and a cultural entry point for non-Latinos: “Because this kind of thing—it’s very needed in this New South.”

Tess Allen is the associate editor.