The audience for the first Roberto Sierra Oregel productions was his family: Armed with a "really bulky camera"—a VHS recorder—he would "create these little stories and film them," using relatives for cast and crew. One time, he turned his sister's living room into a Tijuana bar, where "the main character ends up getting butchered—there was all this ketchup." Playing the lead, Roberto’s brother "faked it really well—it was so much fun."

At the time, Roberto was 14, and the goal was to amuse his family as the party wound down after dinner, he says: "I saw the camera as a play toy." These days, Roberto’s camera is the tool of his profession, and his audience is considerably larger. Showtime broadcast his documentary film, "Dominance and Terror: A Discussion by Noam Chomsky."

Also, Roberto’s goals have grown beyond pure entertainment. At the moment, he’s developing a DVD project about Casa Libre, a nonprofit providing a home for undocumented teenagers whose flight from abuse brought them to Los Angeles. The idea is "to give a face to these kids," Roberto says. "These aren’t your normal illegals—these kids are refugees who are leaving harsh circumstances."

The DVD will include a 20-minute film describing Casa Libre, a menu of short vignettes about the young people who live there, and a discussion of legal issues involving unaccompanied undocumented minors. Reconfigured into a more traditional documentary, the same subject may become Roberto’s thesis project for his MFA from the School of Theater, Film, and Television.

But Roberto’s participation has gone beyond filmmaking, says Professor Chon Noriega, director of the Chicano Studies Research Center, which has a community partnership grant to work with Casa Libre. "He brings to this project a deep sense of humanity," Professor Noriega says, proposing and then implementing field trips to UCLA and the Museum of Contemporary Art, music and poetry workshops, and an architectural tour of downtown Los Angeles.

Roberto’s first project in film school—a two-minute film called "Racing Thoughts"—was a response to the events of September 11: Juxtaposing a businessman (John Morgan) trying to escape from a smoky office with snatches of childhood scenes, sometimes shown on a bank of television screens. "His mind is racing to find a comforting thought to hold onto as he’s seeing his life slip away," Roberto says.

In 2003, Showtime offered financial support and a showcase for films about war. Roberto wrote to Noam Chomsky, a noted professor of linguistics at MIT whose terrain is American politics, and asked him to do interviews for a short film. Chomsky said yes "almost instantaneously."

However, "trying to do a film on an intellectual and his ideas" was a challenge, Roberto concedes. His adviser, Professor Marina Goldovskaya, says problems with the soundtrack were so serious that she "didn’t know how he would get out of this." Roberto’s solution was to cut Chomsky’s monologue on terrorism and American foreign policy into a soundtrack of music and play it against a kaleidoscopic succession of images that bounce from the Boston campus to American military actions and back.

The finished product was an excellent film, Professor Goldavskaya says: "Sometimes Roberto makes things that are impossible to make." Roberto seems less surprised by the outcome. In the midst of these challenges, he told Professor Goldovskaya: "You have to have two things to be an artist, to be a filmmaker: You have to have the will, and you have to have the faith. I have those two things."

He also has gifts of persuasion and a knack for finding good mentors. Consider the circumstances of his conversion from amateur filmmaker to fledgling professional, which took place across the UCLA campus from the film school while Roberto was working toward a master’s degree in Latin American history. Instead of writing a paper for his class with Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese John Skirius, Roberto proposed doing a visual project on Chicano artwork.

"I hopped in my car and started photographing all these beautiful murals throughout Los Angeles," Roberto says. "Along the way, I started meeting all these great artists in the community." While a still camera was OK for murals, interviewing artists called for something more sophisticated, and Roberto soon equipped himself with one of the first Hi 8 video cameras.

That first documentary focused on the interplay between murals and graffiti, particularly in places like the Estrada Courts. Besides serving as a report for Professor Skirius’s course, the film was shown in various venues around Los Angeles, and Roberto’s film career was launched.

The next step was taken when he met Latino performance artist and painter Gronk and persuaded him to do a video interview, which lasted through the night until "we pretty much ran out of tape" about 6 a.m. Although the original topic was Gronk’s trajectory as an artist, the subtext for Roberto was a history of East Los Angeles.

Concerned about gang influence, Roberto’s parents had moved the family out of Los Angeles to the small town of Reedley, near Fresno, just as Roberto was beginning to explore the city on his own. Later, Roberto "realized that I was growing up in East LA at a crucial moment in time," and Gronk helped him to fill in the years he had missed along with the cultural context of the growing Latino art community. Gronk also became his mentor—and neighbor, advising Roberto of an available studio in a downtown building populated by artists like himself.

Those artists became Roberto’s collaborators as, master’s degree in hand, he took a job teaching at the 20th Street Elementary School, where "I saw myself" in the Latino and Mexican youngsters struggling in poverty. With his neighbors, Roberto engaged the youngster in projects like the Latino Nutracker he produced one Christmas. His filmmaking took second place to his teaching until a colleague at the school asked what he was doing teaching when he had this other talent.

UCLA’s film school was exactly what he wanted: "You get your hands dirty in all aspects of film," he says. Now just a quarter or two away from getting his degree, Roberto is starting to feel "the pressure of what’s going to happen." For now, he wants "to do the best job I can do" with the Casa Libre project, while keeping an eye open for "the next step, the next opportunity," he says. "You work with faith, hoping that something else comes your way."

Published in Winter 2006, Graduate Quarterly