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Affleck and Hathaway, Lawrence and Day-Lewis may have been the most notable winners on Sunday night, the artists who cemented their Hollywood legacies at the 2013 Academy Awards. But no one’s life has changed more this year from starring in an Oscar-winning movie than Inocente Izucar. The name might not ring a bell, but you’ll remember the acceptance speech for Best Documentary Short, when Inocente‘s co-director Sean Fine introduced her to the world. “We want to thank this young lady who was homeless just a year ago and now she’s standing in front of all of you,” he said. “She’s an artist and all of you are artists and we feel like we need to start supporting the arts. They’re dying in our communities. And all of us artists, we need to stand up and help girls like her be seen and heard. It’s so important. Thank you.”
Fine and his wife and collaborator, Andrea Nix Fine, discovered Izucar in San Diego four years ago, when the Oscar-nominated duo (War Dance) were searching for subjects for a documentary about homelessness. Then 15, Izucar and her family moved 30 times in the previous nine years, never living in the same place for more than three months. Her father, who’d illegally brought his family north of the border when Izucar was a child, had been deported back to Mexico, and her mother struggled to support her four children, toiling at a series of low-paying odd jobs. But it wasn’t her plight that made Izucar so compelling a subject; it was her talent and her spirit. She is a promising artist who starts each day painting bright and extravagant makeup on her face, and after the filmmakers connected with her through a San Diego non-profit called ARTS: A Reason to Survive that supports at-risk youngsters, they spent the next two years documenting her life. “I don’t even want to imagine where I would be if there wasn’t the documentary and everything that’s going on with it,” says Izucar. “I’m really thankful to Sean and Andrea.” READ FULL STORY »
