Prado

The feature’s director Anayansi Prado was “moved” and “horrified” by what had happened and felt motivated to make a film about the event after seeing members of the affected families on TV.

“I saw that there were Latinos, they were Mexican American, that it was a border town, that it was an agricultural farming town, and that really resonated with me and with communities I’ve done film work with before,” Prado told The Times.

Prado began reaching out to people in Uvalde shortly after the shooting, but didn’t hear back from anyone for over two months due to the inundation of media requests everyone in the city was receiving.

Ahead of the film’s screening Saturday at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Prado spoke with The Times about the process and the challenges of making her documentary.

In the early ’50s, Vargas Llosa’s father dispatched him to the Colegio Militar Leoncio Prado, a military school in Lima, because he thought it would “cure” the boy of his interest in literature.