(2003)
On the run from a $45,000 debt, critically acclaimed, San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker Amalia Ortiz has returned home and is hiding out in Texas. When her attempt to make ends meet working in the family business, selling quaint folk art door-to-door doesn't work out, she turns her artistic sights on Speeder, the Chicano punk band rehearsing across the street. She has ambitions to create a documentary portrait of the band detailing "the cultural poetics of Mexican American South Texas." The band just wants to make a music video. As artist and band collaborate, their simple plan to recreate a scene from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" in the middle of San Antonio's annual Fiesta celebration quickly spirals out of control. What follows is a mass media maelstrom of hijacked floats, kidnapped beauty queens, and an inevitable place in rock and roll history. e86 Written by Jim Mendiola