Freeing Juanita
Director: Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers
Guatemala, 2025, 74 min
Shooting Format:Full Frame Digital 4K
Festival Year:2026
Category:Documentary Feature
Genres:Activism, Lyrical, Migration, Road Trip, Advocacy
Crew:Producers: Ana Gómez, Tristan Call, Adrián Gutiérrez. Editors: Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers, Lorena Alvarado. Cinematographer: Sebastian Lasaosa Rogers.
Email:seblasrog@gmail.com
Synopsis
Juanita has been unjustly detained in Reynosa, Mexico for over seven years, accused of a crime she didn’t commit and forced to confess in a language she didn’t understand. This intimate portrait follows Ana and Pedro, Juanita’s aunt and uncle, on their thousand-mile journey from the highlands of Guatemala. With the help of their Maya Chuj community and a network of Maya interpreters, they fight for Juanita’s freedom and demand justice from the Mexican authorities, a cause that became internationally recognized for its defense of migrants’ rights and language justice.
About the director
Sebastián is a Spanish-American filmmaker and cinematographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Freeing Juanita is his directorial feature debut. As a cinematographer he has lensed documentaries such as The Art of Making It (2021) which won an Audience Award at SXSW. His documentary short film Esquilas en la montaña (2017) premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival. Sebastián got his start in film while studying Anthropology and Film at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, TN where he made his first bilingual videos supporting social justice and workers’ rights campaigns.
Filmmaker's note
I learned to make films supporting workers rights campaigns in Nashville, TN over ten years ago. Fluent in Spanish thanks to my Spanish immigrant mother, and having lived my first four years in Mexico, I volunteered at a bi-lingual workers center where I met and first collaborated with co-producer Tristan Call.
The history of colonialism, cross-cultural influences, and friendships and family ties all interconnect me and many of us in the US with Central America as “implicated subjects.” The impacts of anti-migrant US border policy reverberate farther than we often see, and lead to the criminalization of migrants.
In May of 2022, I produced a short advocacy video supporting Juanita’s freedom campaign. After her release, I felt that this story could have an even bigger impact.
I am particularly invested in sharing the story of Juanita’s release because community-led activist success stories are rare and all the more inspirational, especially to migrants, their families, and the allies who support them.
In this film I explore Ana and Pedro’s love for their niece, the solidarity of the young women from diverse Maya communities around rural Guatemala working together, stories and motivations for migration, and activist campaign tactics.
I hope that by sharing this story, audiences will see the perseverance, hope, and solidarity required to free just one person from wrongful detention which traps so many vulnerable people on their way to a better life.
FREEING JUANITA will be a reminder that fighting structural injustice can be successful if we don’t give up and work together across borders and languages.
— Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers