Sam Osborn

A year in the life of an underdog competitive high school mariachi band in the Texas borderlands.

Folk Frontera is a magical-realist portrait of life in the borderlands. The film follows two fronteriza women as they struggle to find their place in the vast Chihuahuan Desert, a region whose culture is thousands of years old, but which is bisected by the U.S.-Mexico border.

When the activist painter Judy Baca conceived The Great Wall of Los Angeles in 1975 as a monument to the history of indigenous peoples in California, she didn't realize that she was embarking on a 50-year journey that would employ 400 youth painters and amount to one of the largest murals on the planet.