Just south of Abram sits a Montezuma bald cypress that’s more than 900 years old. The tree lives between the border wall—constructed on Texas soil—and the Rio Grande, which acts as a natural boundary between the United States and Mexico. In 2017, artist and musician Andres Sanchez took friend and business partner C. Díaz to see the famed arboreal specimen to scout a film project.
Literally rooted in a place between worlds, that cypress is an apt symbol for what the visual artists would eventually create—the Harlingen-based ENTRE Film Center. Founded in 2021, the cooperative provides education around cinema and is building a film archive that documents the culture of regional border communities.
Taking a historical view of the Rio Grande, before the river became a dividing line, Díaz explains, “It was a place where everyone met to exchange knowledge and skills and information.” ENTRE, whose name translates as “between,” serves that same function for the Valley today.
Enjoying this article?Both natives of the area, the duo harbored a similar feeling about the RGV—a sense that the people and culture of the region aren’t a monolith. So, Díaz came up with a plan to tap into the region’s creative community and establish a beacon that would help amplify local voices and produce more accurate representations of life in the Valley.
The resulting enterprise provides a wide range of services, including regular movie screenings and workshops on topics like color correcting film. The cooperative has also supported the production of several local filmmaking projects, such as The Botanical Gardens: An Urban Oasis, a documentary about the McAllen Nature Center, and an archival project that collects home movies and photographs from Boca Chica Beach—an area that has seen its share of controversy as the site of SpaceX’s launch facility.
From public-facing film education to documentation of the region’s natural treasures, the center’s work protects and uplifts the whole community. “We’ve become responsible for something that’s bigger than ourselves,” Sanchez says. “And it’s been cool to rise to that occasion.”
