Movie about merengue singer Milly Quezada to open the Santo Domingo Global Film Festival

Santo Domingo.- A film about the Dominican singer Milly Quezada, known as ‘The Queen of Merengue’, will inaugurate the 18th edition of the Santo Domingo Global Film Festival on January 28, the Global Democracy and Development Foundation (Funglode), which organizes the film exhibition, reported this Monday. Directed by Leticia Tonos, the film ‘Milly, the Queen of Merengue’, tells the life of Milly Quezada, who emigrated at a very young age to the United States to escape the Dominican civil war of 1965 and found in music a path of personal and cultural affirmation in Washington Heights in the 70s of the last century, according to Funglode. The film combines the portrait of her artistic career with her intimate history, addressing memory, identity, and resilience, they added at a press conference. At the inauguration of the exhibition, at the National Theater of the Dominican capital, a tribute will be paid to Quezada herself, for her sustained contribution to the international projection of merengue, and to the Dominican singer and actress Cecilia García, for her career in theater, cinema and music. The short film ‘Platanero’ will also be screened, a collaboration between the Dominican Republic and Canada which, according to those responsible for the event, “proposes a narrative loaded with realism, mysticism and struggle, establishing itself as one of the most outstanding pieces of the event.” In the sample, which will run until February 4, the documentary ‘They Called Us Trujillo’s Jews’ will also be exhibited, a production that addresses one of the least known pages of Dominican history regarding refuge, exile and identity. The Santo Domingo Global Film Festival features Hungary as the guest country in this edition.

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Among the guests are Dominican-American writer Julia Álvarez, considered one of the most influential literary voices of the Latin American diaspora, as well as the general director of Latido Films and member of the European Film Academy, the Spaniard Antonio Saura, and the Mexican-Canadian director and screenwriter Arturo Pérez Navarro. Also, American composer and producer Preston Glass, Puerto Rican producer and lawyer Annabelle Mullen Pacheco, and Cuban Pedro Enrique Ortega Lang, founder and programmer of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema.