Quinceañera

Magdalena is the daughter of a devout Mexican American family in the Echo Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Months before her fifteenth birthday celebration she finds out she is pregnant and her father puts her out of the house. Where she goes is the small home of her elderly great-granduncle Tomas, where her cousin Carlos, also thrown out, is already staying. The three of them make a family out of people nobody wanted. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland wrote and directed the film together; both lived in Echo Park, and most of the cast were non-professionals from the neighbourhood. The story is not only about the pregnancy: the changing of the neighbourhood, rising rents and the pushing out of long-time residents run alongside it. The relationship between Tomas and the couple who own the property sits at the centre of that tension. The film took both the grand jury prize and the audience award at Sundance in 2006.