‘Inocente,’ Short Documentary of Immigrant Wins Oscar

By Tony Castro, Voxxi

There were no political speeches pressing for immigration reform at Sunday’s 85th Academy Awards, but a documentary short about an undocumented immigrant was one of the big winners at the Oscars.

Inocente is a film that follows Inocente Izucar, a homeless, undocumented immigrant teenage girl in San Diego, as she relentlessly pursues her dream of becoming an artist.

At the same time, the immigration reform debate that has been swirling around undocumented immigrants was a foreign topic to Inocente.

‘We were taken with her’

“I didn’t understand that we were illegal,” she says. “My mom didn’t really tell us so we were left in the dark, which was a good thing ’cause no little kid wants to be scared that he’s gonna be deported.”

As a child, Inocente was constantly uprooted, moving more than 30 times in nine years.

She sometimes slept in crowded quarters beside her three younger brothers under one temporary roof after another, and sometimes even outdoors.

Inocente’s father was deported to Mexico for domestic abuse, and she once stood on a bridge and talked her mother out of jumping to her death.

Directors Sean and Andrea Nix Fine spent nearly two years filming the short documentary on the streets of San Diego. The Fines met Inocente three years ago when she was 15.

“She had something that was sort of childlike in her vulnerability and innocence,” says Andrea Fine, “and the way she dreamed about waiting for her life to start—as well as a beyond-her-years maturity.”

“We were taken with her,” said Sean Fine.

Despite the darkness in her life, Inocente painted brilliant flowers, rainbows and bold geometric designs—and her artistic eye makeup became her signature look.

“In the morning when I get up, it makes me happy just to paint on something,” Inocente told the Fines. “So, what better than my face?”

As a sign of the triumph of her spirit, Inocente, now 18, is no longer homeless.

She has rented an apartment and supports herself selling her artwork in shows often teamed with a screening of the documentary.

“It was a documentary,” she says, humbly discounting her own contributions to the project. “So I didn’t have to act out anything. They just followed me around everywhere.”

This article was first published in Voxxi.

Los Angeles based writer Tony Castro is the author of the critically-acclaimed “Chicano Power: The Emergence of Mexican America” and the best-selling “Mickey Mantle: America’s Prodigal Son.”