New York City
Luis Argueta is a Guatemalan-American film director and producer whose work spans feature films, documentaries, shorts, commercials and episodic TV. Argueta has been telling transnational immigrant stories since 1977. His feature film, “The Silence of Neto,”a coming-of-age story set in 1954 Cold-War-Guatemala, is the first Guatemalan film internationally recognized and awarded. The Guardian listed Argueta as one of Guatemala’s National Living Icons. Argueta was awarded the Order of Quetzal in the degree of Grand Officer, the highest honor given by Guatemala. He is the recipient of the 2019 Harris Wofford Global Citizen Award, the highest honor bestowed upon a global leader by the National Peace Corps Association.
His film series on immigration brings into sharp focus the human face of immigrants, their resilience and the vision of communities that recognize the contributions immigrants make to the American society. The first film, “abUSed: The Postville Raid,” tells the story of the largest single-site immigration raid in the history of the U.S. The second film, “ABRAZOS” (2014), follows the journey of 14 U.S. citizen children from Minnesota to Guatemala to meet their grandparents for the first time. “The U Turn” (2017), tells how a group of immigrant workers, with the courage to break the silence and the solidarity of a community, transformed their lives. He is at work on a new immigration film about the long-lasting effects of family separations.
In the spring of 2018 Argueta served as a consultant for the Migration Policy Institute report, “Sustainable Reintegration: Strategies to Support Migrants Returning to Mexico and Central America.”