In 2026, it’s hard to catch many good things floating down the Rio Grande, heavy with the weight of unsuccessful crossers, razor-lined buoys, and the pollution of millions of borderlanders.
This summer, the river took on new life with the Miraaa Media Festival, an experimental collaboration between several border creatives.
Miraaa has come a long way since its first year in 2021, in which the festival was fully virtual and focused in the Río Grande Valley where founding organizations Entre Film Center and Trucha RGV are located. In its second year, the Laredo Film Society and Daphne Art Foundation joined to lead the addition of Laredo as a venue.
This year, the festival expanded hundreds of miles upriver and added the third venue of Eagle Pass. In line with its collaborative spirit connecting these communities, the Río Grande was the theme of this year’s festival.
The works featured at Miraaa are separated into two categories: featured films, the product of an open call for submissions to creatives along the South Texas border; and the commissioned films, made by creatives of different artistic media and backgrounds, selected and paired by a group of Miraaa stewards.
In Laredo, the Featured Short award went to Despues de la Luz, a film by former VMT alum Maya López, now at UT-Austin. The movie was filmed at Casa Ortiz and featured a quinceañera that is violently interrupted by an ICE raid. The film presented a relevant and compelling portrait of modern life on the Texas border. Whereas this region has historically had traditional life coexisting with a militarized border, the film shows how the politics of the day have increasingly disrupted this balance.
The commissioned artist award went to Plaza Eterna, a collaboration between Leann Bernal and Ryan Cerna. The film was set to the story of a “flooded” Plaza Theater, invoking surreal memories of not just the recent past when the theater still thrived downtown, but much farther back to the days of the earliest native stewards of the great river.
The Miraaa organizers commissioned Bernal and Cerna to produce the film. Miraaa intentionally tries to include artists from non-film backgrounds, which includes Bernal who is a professional dancer. The production began with the original score, the work of Miro Santos who was given the tight deadline of two weeks to prepare it. Bernal worked with dancers to choreograph the performance to the score. Cerna, an experienced editor, transformed the filmed choreography into a surreal wave of movement in tones of black and green with archival images of the historic Plaza Theater after it opened in the 1950s. The production harkened back to the long-gone golden age of downtown Laredo.
The seamless choreography movements gave the impression that all dancers are part of one uniform organism moving together. This effect was inspired by Bernal’s desire to reflect the flow of water, how we are made of water, and how water is made of memories. Bernal was also inspired by tribal dance to emulate how our ancestors might have interacted with the river.
“I’m really grateful that we had this opportunity as border artists. Since Miraaa is experimental, there is no right or wrong. As a dancer, you have to have narrative for everything, and it was nice to create something open to interpretation that you could just feel, like the river and how it feels,” Bernal said.
(Ryan Cantú was born and raised in Laredo and has 10 years of experience in various areas of civil litigation. He is a lover and supporter of the arts and serves on the board of the Laredo Film Society. In addition to writing articles for Texas publications, he is currently writing a book under contract with Texas Tech University Press about the culinary traditions of South Texas and Northeastern Mexico. )
