Santa Fe Film Festival 2009

Spoken Word depicts the edgy collision of old and new worlds when San Francisco spoken-word artist Cruz Montoya (Kuno Becker) returns to New Mexico to be with his dying father, Senior (Rubén Blades). The film takes us inside the poet’s creative process as Cruz struggles to integrate his family history and the place he’s from with the poet he’s become and the man he wants to be.Cruz Montoya is a rock star on the West Coast poetry circuit, where audiences from San Diego to Seattle gather to hear him perform. Just off the road from such a tour, he gets an unexpected phone call alerting him that his father is fatally ill. Cruz rushes home to his dying father, a reclusive former schoolteacher still leading a traditional life in their once bucolic mountain valley, now ravaged by poverty, heroin abuse and violence. Cruz’s younger brother, Ramon (Antonio Elias), is a modern Hispanic male estranged from their father since trading a piece of family land for a slice of the American dream, a suburban house for his growing family.Struggling to cope with these unspoken conflicts, Cruz retreats to his old life, managing a Santa Fe hip-hop club owned by local crime boss Emilio (Miguel Sandoval), who Senior used to run with back in the day. Seduced by the fast action and easy money, Cruz loses his poetic voice, his identity, and almost his life, before, through spoken words, he heals his relationships with his family, his community, and himself.