By Town Crier Staff Report

With youthful memories of Sunday matinees at Palo Alto’s Varsity Theater, writer-director Glenn Robert Smith presented the northern California premiere of his award-winning 35mm feature film directorial debut “Los Patriotas,” a true-life murder-drama shot in a recreated illegal Mexican migrant camp, this past Friday as part of the 10th Festival Cine Latino!

Having studied film at Foothill Community College in Los Altos Hills before earning his bachelor’s degree in telecommunications and film at San Diego State University, Smith — a self-described “gringo raised among Hispanics” in Mountain View’s Castro City neighborhood — considered the film’s inclusion in the Cine Latino! fest to be strategic. He’s gearing up to secure a Bay Area exhibitor with five venues for a four-city, 20-theater platform release later this year.

Several actors from the film, which took “Best of Fest” First Runner-Up honors at the recent San Diego Latino Film Festival, attended the screening, including star Olivia Peña who plays tormented migrant worker Evelia; veteran Mexican TV idol Luis Torner who portrays the hard-knocks camp elder in comic relief; Latino teen idol Roberto Enrique, recently featured in a nationwide Coca-Cola television commercial and who stars in upcoming movies on HBO and Nickelodeon; and Lina Acosta, who appeared in the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Smith said the film, cost $1 million to make and it took him years to secure the funding.

“I never got discouraged,” he said.

Smith’s film was inspired by the 1991 murder of a migrant worker and the maid, Evelia, who saw the act and is in hiding to this day, fearing for her life.

“I wrote the screenplay from her viewpoint,” Smith said.

For more information, visit www.lospatriotasmovie.com or www.cineaccion.com, email glennsmith@dinifilms.com.