Blog Post

“Taught To Hate”

Posted September 25, 2009 by Ted Hesson

A week ago, I attended a special premiere of the trailer for Taught to Hate, a short film that addresses the hate crime problem on Long Island.
The movie is the brainchild of director James Garcia Sotomayor, a 39-year-old Brentwood resident, who felt moved to develop a short film after the killing of Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue last November. The film will make its world premiere tonight in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Theatres, and play there through the weekend (see location and showtimes below).
The short film—it’s less than 25 minutes—was on track to be a $5,000-7,000 undertaking until Garcia Sotomayor linked up with 16-year-old Dix Hills resident Brandon Hannan, who played the role of Vito Spatafore, Jr. on The Sopranos. Hannan and his mother, Helen Proimos, ran into Garcia Sotomayor at a Long Island film festival in June, read the script, and quickly teamed up with the director to make the movie.
The budget soon ballooned to $40,000 and the group started thinking about submitting the film for an Academy Award. That meant they needed to plan, cast, and shoot the film in a matter of weeks.
When I met up with the cast and crew a week ago, they were still hammering out some of the details regarding the soundtrack, but otherwise the movie was ready, and they were looking forward to the premiere in L.A. and the possibility of it being considered for an Academy Award. Garcia Sotomayor—who is an immigrant himself, coming to the U.S. from Guayaquil, Ecuador, nine years ago—was busy making calls about music licensing, so I spent some time talking to some of the other people involved in making the film.
Richard Caban, who collaborated on the script with Garcia Sotomayor, gave me some background on the film itself. He said that “it’s about a hate crime that occurs, but it’s also just about why these feelings come up with people, especially with a younger crowd.” One of the main characters, he said, is a racist uncle (played by a well-cast Nick Rao) who often “says what’s on his mind. Judging by the preview, the uncle’s mind seems to gravitate toward rants about the “damn wetbacks” who are destroying the country—all spoken in front of his teenage nephew, played by Hannan.
Asked why Hannan and Proimos agreed to film with an unknown local director, Hannan said that he believed the film had a “good purpose,” and Proimos added that “it really was the best script that I’d ever read.”
Assemb. Phil Ramos (D-Brentwood) was also in attendance, and he offered a few works before we watched the trailer:
“Our community is starting to channel what are normally negative emotions,” Ramos said, referring to the violence against Latinos in Suffolk County. “The importance of this movie is not so much what’s in this movie, it’s what happens afterward.”
That said, the filmmakers think they made a darn good movie. Hopefully they’ll get some feedback after the release this weekend. Here’s the trailer:

Newsday interviewed Garcia Sotomayor and other cast members over the summer while they were filming. Here’s the video: