Cesar’s Last Fast
Description
On August 21, 1988, more than 6,000 supporters, including Reverend Jesse Jackson, actor Martin Sheen and Ethel Kennedy, all waited in rapt attention under a giant white tent, many weeping, as United Farmworkers founder Cesar Chavez broke a 36-day, water-only fast. Undertaken in solidarity with a flagging boycott of California grape growers, the latest of the legendary labor organizer’s many fasts, proved to be the last dramatic public stand in the life of a man devoted to the betterment of the lives around him. Using that final act of political theater as their lens, Chavez’s former press secretary Lorena Parlee and co-director Richard Ray Perez sift through an unparalleled store of archival footage to chronicle a rich history: Chavez’s beginnings as a laborer in the fields, his organization of the UFW, the union’s fight against the Teamsters and finally his premature death in 1993. The documentary weaves the galvanizing story of a man devoted to the people at all costs, in the words of one friend, “The humble and simple figure of Cesar Chavez … who ultimately is not so humble and not so simple at all.” –Jackson Scarlett
Richard Ray Perez directed, with Joan Sekler, Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (2002). He also directed the TV series The Sierra Club Chronicles. The son of a farmworker, as a child he participated in the United Farm Workers grape boycott.
Lorena Parlee (1945-2006) was a Professor of Mexican and Chicano History at several University of California campuses. She started volunteering with the United Farm Workers in 1986; producing, writing and directing a UFW advocacy video The Wrath of Grapes and beginning work on what would become Cesar’s Last Fast. In 1988, when Cesar Chavez undertook his final major fast, Parlee was his press secretary and spokesperson. She also directed and produced an award-winning IMAX short, Mexico (2000).
Film Details
Language Spanish, English
Year 2013
Runtime 100
Country USA
Director Richard Ray Perez, Lorena Parlee
Producer Richard Ray Perez, Molly O’Brien, Lorena Parlee
Editor Jean-Philippe Boucicaut, Lewis Erskine, Christopher S. Johnson
Cinematographer James Chressanthis, Byron Shah
Music Ed Barguiarena
Print Source Monkey Mind Media, Inc./ rickperez@earthlink.net/ CesarsLastFast.com