Dirty Feathers

After many years working as a camera operator for non-fiction master Roberto Minervini, Carlos Alfonso Corral enters the spotlight himself with his remarkable debut DIRTY FEATHERS. This troubling, yet deeply compassionate documentary forges a portrait of the people in and around “The Opportunity Center”, better known as the O.C., a homeless shelter in downtown El Paso, Texas, on the Mexican border. They include a young married couple looking to the future, a former photographer with post-traumatic stress disorder, a bi-polar man attempting college again, a sexagenarian anti-Trumpist, a gender-bending fairy, and a mysterious young woman whose lyrical, metaphysical narration ties these individual fates together. The handheld camera floats freely, ever attentive to gesture, body language, and movement, creating a space of patience, attention, and compassion that allow this diverse set of characters to do whatever feels right in the moment, to speak, to listen, to recall, to perform, to confess, to stay silent, to be; as the photographer remarks, they have to depict themselves. For Corral, there is no contradiction in placing the ugliness of life and its great beauty side by side; life is black and white, dark and light, grey and shimmering and everything in between. (James Lattimer)

Carlos Alfonso Corral: DIRTY FEATHERS (2021)