Take a seat in the Director’s Chair through this virtual discussion and screening of select scenes from our featured film, “Salsa, un tumbao’ caribeño”. This program will give viewers an opportunity to hear directly from filmmakers Jeanette Charles and Beni Marquez on the source of their inspiration and creative direction.
“Salsa, un tumbao' caribeño” (Salsa, A Caribbean Flow) explores salsa music’s cultural legacy and its everyday realities from the heart of the Caribbean to New York City. This project is deeply rooted in Beni Marquez’s background as an Afro-Venezuelan filmmaker and immigrant. Marquez hails from San Agustin, Caracas where salseros like Ismael Rivera, Eddie Palmieri, and Cheo Feliciano among other great musicians performed and shared with community artists.
Featuring interviews with celebrated percussionists and singers, cultural stewards, including CCCADI Executive Director Melody Capote, community activists, and everyday people, this film addresses issues such as race, gender, and immigration providing a fresh perspective on salsa in the 21st century. “Salsa, un tumbao' caribeño” is a bilingual production that traverses Caracas, Venezuela; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and New York City, New York.
This film captures the soul of how salsa transformed from a musical genre into a socio-cultural movement whose social impact, global reach, and intergenerational role has forever shaped Latinx and Afro-Caribbean identities at home and in the Diaspora.
“Salsa, un tumbao' caribeño” is currently in the final phase of production with an anticipated release date in Summer 2023.
To view the airing of this discussion and scene screening, visit this page on March 29 at 7 PM (EST). This conversation will be in English and Spanish.
Meet the Filmmakers:
Director
Beni Marquez, is an Afro-Venezuelan filmmaker (director, cinematographer, and screenwriter) from San Agustin, Caracas whose work includes documentary features, music video direction, as well as television and radio production.
In 2022, Beni was selected for the prestigious Cucalorus and Working Films Work-in-Progress Immersive Lab for Black Directors in North Carolina. From The Heart Productions also named Salsa one of its "Hot Films in the Making” in 2022 and a post-production finalist in 2023.
His first feature documentary, Mamá África (2018), tells the story of the spiritual and cultural connections between Nigeria and Venezuela. Mamá África was featured in the Rhode Island Black Film Festival (2021), Pan-African Film Festival (2020), Black Communities Conference (2019), and Afro-Latino Film Festival (2019) as well as other renowned festivals, universities, and organizations.
Beni is also the architect behind Drummer Sessions, an international, multimedia platform dedicated to the diffusion and promotion of Afro-Caribbean percussion.
He is based in Los Angeles.
Executive Producer / Producer
Jeanette Charles, Executive Producer & Producer, is a storyteller, trained oral historian (M.A. '19, UCLA), long-time activist and journalist of Haitian-German ancestry with previous experience in radio and television production.
As Salsa’s Producer, she participated in the Sundance Collab's Documentary Film Intensive and Film Producer programs and studied Film Marketing at UCLA.
In 2021, she also produced a 30-minute docu-style report focused on Los Angeles County’s annual initiative in support of healing justice through the arts and community organizing. She is the founder of Ìyá Global, a coaching, consulting, educational travel, and multimedia hub.
Meet the Moderator:
Curator, Rhythm, Bass and Place Series
Lynnée Denise was shaped as a scholar and a DJ by her parent’s record collection. She is an artist, writer, and DJ whose work reflects on underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Denise coined the phrase "DJ Scholarship" to reposition the role of the DJ from a party purveyor to an archivist, cultural custodian, and information specialist. Her bylines have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Black Scholar Journal, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Oprah Daily. Her writing is also part of anthologies including Women Who Rock, and Outside the XY: Queer Black and Brown Masculinity. In 2020, Lynnée Denise was invited to be an Artist in Residence at the Stanford University Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and she was invited to be the Sterling Brown '22 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. She is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths University of London.
Rhythm, Bass and Place: Connections and Reflections on Music of the African Diaspora
This CCCADI five-month-long series celebrates the migration and creative evolution of Black music by highlighting the routes of rhythms and sound culture in a Diasporic context. Rhythm, Bass and Place: Connections and Reflections on Music of the African Diaspora constructs a living archive through engaging stories from neighborhoods, stages, studios and dance floors that shaped the sonic landscape in select U.S., U.K. and Caribbean cities over the last three decades.