The 20th Latin American Film Festival continued Saturday in the Campus Cinema with Milagros: Made in Mexico, a documentary showing a side of migration Americans rarely see.

The film featured women in Pozos, Mexico, many of whom had been left behind by family migrating to America in search of work.

“We really wanted to focus on the Mexican perspective,” Monique Velasquez, director and ’88 alumna in mass communication, said.

She said people living in North Carolina have a different perspective of Latinos than those living in areas like Texas where Hispanics have been living in large numbers for some time.

“North Carolina is new to this idea [of a large immigrant population] and it wasn’t seeing a positive portrayal of Latinos,” Velasquez said. “This particular film allowed me to … introduce North Carolinians to a positive portrayal of Mexicans, specifically.”

Students in attendance said they were impressed with the documentary. Sara Yasin, a junior in textile and apparel management, said it was a perspective she had never seen before.

“People tend to look at [immigrants] as people who are trying to take advantage of the other country,” Yasin, said. “This showed that people might be coming over here out of desperation, because it’s their last option.”

Bob Kessler, a senior in psychology, lived in Mexico for a year and said he was pleased with the film.

“It really is drastically different how things are down there and how we perceive things up here,” Kessler said.

Martina Guzman, creator, producer and director of the film, said the film came about from the desire to look at the immigration issue in the U.S. from a different perspective.

“When this immigration debate really came to a head in the United States, I felt that there were two questions that no one asked,” Guzman said. “Why are people migrating and if they are migrating at the numbers that the news and the media was touting … what impact is that having on Mexico?”

Guzman and the three other women of the production company responsible for the film made two separate trips to Mexico.

What they found were “groups of women doing doing whatever they could to bring their families back home,” Guzman said.

The women featured in the film were members of various small co-ops formed to make ends meet, and in some cases to bring family members home from the U.S.

“When I first got there, the first thing I thought was this is an amazing story [and] people need to know about this,” Guzman said. “People need to know that there is another side to migration.”

Kessler said he appreciated the documentary for bringing that awareness to campus.

“It opens eyes here that wouldn’t otherwise see,” he said.