The ancestral songs with which San Basilio de Palenque, the first black town that managed to free itself from slavery, bids farewell to its dead.

A center for LGBTQ refugees in the jungle city of Manaus, where three Venezuelans reinvent themselves.

An elderly woman fixes her TV to sit and watch President Barak Obama visit Cuba, and as she watches, remembers her life as a militant of the revolution.

In a Mexican town, two men take refuge in the traditional music of the son jarocho to escape the drug wars.

These are some of the stories that the San Francisco Latino Film Festival CINEOLA is going to stream through the Seed & Spark platform. During the six days of the festival, short films from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil will be available.

Proceeds collected through the platform will be used to fund CARECEN SF, a non-profit organization that supports immigrant and low-income Latino families, and Roxie and Artists' Television Access in San Francisco.

Tickets to see the shorts in each section of the programming ("Remember" and "Resist") cost $8 and the pass to all programming costs $12.

The culture industries have been heavily affected by the coronavirus pandemic without governments showing much interest in carrying out programs to prevent their disappearance.

The closure of theatres, cinemas, bars, bookstores and auditoriums and the cancellation of festivals have driven artists and cultural managers away from their audiences and reduced opportunities for public outreach.

In the case of cinema, independent film festivals were an important opportunity to showcase work that was unlikely to be shown in mainstream theatres and also to help finance new productions.

While the cancellation of face-to-face festivals can lead to an impoverishment of the cultural agenda in cities when it is possible to resume public life, these alternatives, at least, can help people in other regions find stories they might not otherwise see.

It is not every day that one has the opportunity to accompany a fishing family for an entire day in the small town of Taganga in Colombia or to observe two brothers walking through the Ecuadorian jungle while they count the times they have seen death face to face.