Events

posdata (or what I wish I said) is a part-documentary, part-speculative story about a mysterious postcard-filled trunk that links two timelines in El Paso, the early 1900s and the present day. A printmaker on the verge of losing his shop due to financial strains discovers a trunk that will change his (and our) lives forever. Today, a coveted scholarship forces teenagers from different El Paso high school districts to collaborate on a creative school project. However, an ambitious “group” (who plays in both timelines) has other plans for the print shop and the scholarship’s success. With some material pulled verbatim from the community’s collected postcards, the teenagers are inspired to tell a deeply moving story, but they find themselves censored. In a newly-found hunger to not be censored or stopped and give the people of the community their voices, the students and the printmaker find a loop-hole in their timelines and set forth a call to action that invites us (the audience) to take part in creating the world of the postcards (real life) and give voice to some of the many cards in an unedited, unaltered, unmanipulated way—both in real-time and from those collected. Sometimes historical, sometimes too much in the present-day plights, this what-if frontera epic uses source material to collage, frame, dialogue, and narrate what makes us human and what we would do with the chance to make a difference in our lives and the lives of others.