On March 13th, 2022, “First Time Home,” a film produced by Seth Holmes, former resident researcher at Iméra and holder of the former Institut Paoli Calmettes/Iméra Chair in integrated oncology (2020-21), won the Best Youth Film award at the San Diego Latin Film Festival.
“First Time Home” – a film by Seth Holmes
The film is directed and shot by young Triqui Indigenous people, second-generation immigrants, traveling from their immigrant community in California to their ancestral family village in Oaxaca for the first time.
Seth Holmes began working with the co-directors’ families on research and health projects in 2002 and continued to work with them until the realization of this project. These are the families with whom he collaborated for the research in his first book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies.
Their experiences of illness and healthcare led Seth Holmes to embark on his research project at Iméra. He studied between 2020 and 2021 the ways in which doctors are trained to perceive and respond to social differences and social inequalities during their training for medical care work among patients with diseases, injuries, and various conditions, including cancers, are of crucial importance.
With the four co-directors, they launched the project together when they went from the United States on their first trip to meet their relatives, including their sick grandfather, in their parents’ hometown in southern Mexico.
For Seth Holmes, this visual ethnography is “a new way to explore collaborative research and collaborative ethics across levels of difference” while pursuing his global research on social inequalities, health inequalities, and the ways in which they are naturalized, normalized, and contested.
More information on the official page of First Time Home: https://www.firsttimehomefilm.com/pressandawards
