USA / 2017 / 8mins / Coming of Age, Drama / English and Spanish

Set in the late 1970s in the Upper Manhattan section of New York City, a second generation Dominican woman finds herself trapped between expectation and taboo, as she experiments with her sexuality.

Djali Brown-Cepeda

Djali Cepeda graduated from Eugene Lang College at the New School University, where she completed A pesar de su ausencia as her thesis. She is of Dominican heritage, born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She co-founded SDA (Students Decolonizing Academia), a student-run organization that challenges Eurocentric pedagogy and calls for a university-wide decolonization and diversification of courses, faculty, and syllabi. She is the founder and curator of Nuevayorkinos, a digital archive documenting and preserving NYC Latino history. Her 2016 short, A pesar de su ausencia, won Best LGBT short film at FICMARC (Caribbean Sea Int. Film Festival) in 2018 and was selected for the FECEA, Feminist Border Arts Film Festival and the Dominican Film Festival. Learn More