Filmmaker Emily Cohen Ibañez was recently interviewed for a NPR’s All Things Considered podcast, following the airing of her lyrical coming-of-age doc about a young woman’s experience of systemic poverty on PBS’s POV (10/4). The film, Fruits of Labor, tells the story of a Mexican-American teenager with dreams of finishing high school, who instead finds herself doing back-breaking labor in strawberry fields and a food processing factory to support her family, after ICE raids threaten her parents. Set in a Central California agricultural community, the doc is about an American teen subjected to the forces that keep her family trapped in poverty, which asks what it means to come into one’s power as a working young woman of color in the wealthiest nation in the world?
The film is directed by Emily Cohen Ibañez, a Features juror for SDFF 2021, and Brown Girl Doc Mafia’s Bay Area coordinator.
POV’s Fruits of Labor episode will air on KQED on Oct. 4 at 10 p.m. and will also be available online at that time.