NPS Standalone
Latino Vote: Dispatches from the Battleground
In 2020, Latinos are poised to be the largest ethnicity of voters in the electorate, but wooing constituents based on ethnicity alone may be a losing game plan.
Harvest Season
A catastrophic wildfire comes to wine country, where migrant laborers are hit the hardest — and are essential for the area to rebuild.
- Series
- Independent Lens
- Premiere Date
- May 13, 2019
- Length
- 90 minutes
- Funding Initiative
- Open Call
Director
Bernardo Ruiz
Bernardo Ruiz is a two-time Emmy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker. He has directed and produced four feature documentaries, including The Infinite Race (ESPN’s 30 for 30, 2020), Harvest Season (Independent Lens, 2019), Kingdom of Shadows (Participant Media, 2015) and Reportero (POV, 2013) as well as a host of nonfiction programming.
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The Film
Boutique hotels, Michelin-starred restaurants, and elegant tasting rooms overlooking vineyards — that’s the way we see California’s Napa Valley. Missing from this tourism bureau Instagram feed are the people just off-camera whose unseen labors keep wine country in business. Filmmaker Bernardo Ruiz set out to paint a more nuanced picture, turning his camera in 2017 on Napa’s new generation of Latino winemakers, as well as the often low-wage, largely Latino workforce of grafters, pruners, pickers, and cellar workers. Then, devastating wildfires tore through the region, killing 42 people and leveling hundreds of buildings in Napa and the surrounding counties. The firestorms laid bare not just neighborhoods and hillsides and fields but also, as natural disasters do, the stark economic disparities dividing communities. Harvest Season bears witness to the wildfires and the repercussions for an unheralded, largely immigrant workforce.
