Flaunting Latino Clichés in Effort to Defuse Them

FOR some Hollywood movies, clichés are everything. An asteroid destroys a major city. A shadowy figure appears behind someone in the reflection of medicine cabinet mirror. A Latina maid marries a successful businessman and lives happily ever after.

A new ad campaign for the New York International Latino Film Festival makes fun of those clichés with the goal, its organizers say, of attracting attendees while also drawing attention to the blatant stereotyping of Latinos and others in some big budget movies.

“It was really intended to poke fun, but underneath there’s some truth to them,” Elizabeth Gardner, an executive director of the festival, said of the ads. “That doesn’t mean we’re suggesting anyone should boycott movies.”

Calixto Chinchilla, another executive director, said the festival started 1999 as a way to empower the Latino community and to develop audiences for Latino films.

“At the time there wasn’t really much that targeted the second-generation Hispanic,” Mr. Chinchilla said. The advertising for the festival has evolved from being focused on promoting a young, hip and urban event for Latinos to a broader goal. “It’s the art first and culture second,” Mr. Chinchilla said. The festival will take place Aug. 15-21 in New York.

To promote itself, festival organizers hired Wing, a unit of the Grey Group of WPP that specializes in the Latino market, as their new agency of record. READ MORE