East of Salinas

GALLERY

ABOUT THE FILM

Directors/Producers: Laura Pacheco & Jackie Mow

Genre: Documentary

Program Length: 60 Minutes

Premiere Date: December 28, 2015 on PBS (Please Check All Local Listings)

East of Salinas takes us to the heart of California’s “Steinbeck Country,” the Salinas Valley, to meet a bright boy and his dedicated teacher — both sons of migrant farm workers. With parents who are busy working long hours in the fields, third grader Jose Ansaldo often turns to his teacher, Oscar Ramos, for guidance. But Jose is undocumented; he was born in Mexico,. Like many other migrant children, he is beginning to understand the situation— and the opportunities that may be lost to him through no fault of his own.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS

Laura Pacheco (Co-director/producer)

Laura Pacheco is an award-winning filmmaker, trained anthropologist, and media activist. She likes to take on big issues such as public health, justice, and the environment using personal narrative to do the storytelling. Many of her projects use film to encourage conversation. In the Emmy Award-winning series Rx for Survival(PBS), she followed a young woman dying of drug resistant TB in the slums of Lima, Peru. In Kentucky, she followed evangelical Christians protesting mountaintop removal in Renewal, a film on faith and the environment. In the US, she worked with MoveOn.org to create a film and animation series that questioned the changing roles of motherhood in America. Her films have taken her to the jungles of Guatemala, the rivers of West Africa, and to the tops of the Himalayas and have been shown on PBS, Discovery, The National Geographic Channel, international climate talks, and in classrooms around the world.

Jackie Mow (Co-Director/Producer)

Jackie Mow began her career producing news in France, chasing ambulances for TV news in New Mexico, and reporting for the BBC in Boston. Passionate about science and education, she eventually landed a job at NOVA, the PBS flagship science series. She went on to produce and direct for National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, and PBS Kids. She made films with a great diversity of subjects: the dog genome, Arctic dinosaurs, tunnel engineering, and more. Then she worked on World in the Balance, a NOVA film about population policy that took her to a Nairobi slum. There she profiled a young woman with HIV who was caring for her five orphaned siblings. She went on to work on several projects exploring the psychology of adolescent girls and women including A Girl’s Life, a documentary focusing on personal stories of cyber-bullying, violence, and body image.