I’ve found that taking more and more film analytical classes throughout my time at Hunter has made me more of an annoying viewer. Not to myself of course, and not to the movie, as they’re made to be analyzed, but more so to the people I watch them with, just because I tend to easily pick out discontinuities or question motives as to why a director would shoot a particular scene that way or why would an actor portray their character in this way, when the person next to me is really just trying to watch the movie. This honed sort of thinking though, has definitely helped me in terms of writing papers about movies. It’s really rare now that I sit through a movie without a pen and notebook in hand, unless I’m rewatching a film or seeing it in a movie theater (which would then ruin the experience a little). The most recent film I’ve watched with notebook in hand was Sand Dollars or Dolares de Arena, which is a Dominican film written and directed by Laura Amelia Guzman and her husband Israel Cardenas. I chose this movie to be the focus of my final paper for my Spanish American Women in Film and Literature class. This movie contributes to Third Cinema and LGBTQ films. In class we’ve dedicated a few weeks to Third Cinema, although thinking back at it there were no LGBTQ films in the semester as a whole, probably because LGBTQ+ as a film category is relatively very new when it comes to film history. What interested me historically about this film is that the Dominican Republic is also a relatively new contender in the Latin American film industry, and I find it wonderfully ironic that this film stars Geraldine Chaplin as one of its main protagonists, who is of course the daughter of one of our credited founding fathers of the Hollywood industry as we know it, Charlie Chaplin. This movie does follow a lot of Latin American movie tropes, with its rather slow pacing, musical motifs and moments where seemingly nothing happens but is infused with deep heavy meaning. This film was released in 2014, and has been nominated and won several awards, including the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cairo International Film Festival for International Competition Feature Films and Best Actress at the Havana Film Festival for Geraldine Chaplin (which is a double honor considering that Cuba is one of the founding locations for Latin American Third Cinema).