Holy Tortilla was inspired by the true-life story of a lady who discovered the face of Jesus in a tortilla. As such appearances of divine images in everyday objects increased with the approach of the millennium in the United States and Mexico -- from the image of the Virgin Mary in a Florida bank window to the more lighthearted discovery of Mother Theresa in a cinnamon bun in Tennessee -- I began to recognize that we are actively looking for elements of the divine in our daily lives. What fascinated me was the idea of a staple of the Tex-Mexican diet, the flour tortilla, suddenly becoming a mystical and magical object through a young woman's faith. On one level, Holy Tortilla is a fairy tale of how a young woman, Margarita, escapes the banalities of life and ultimately finds happiness through an encounter with a what might be seen as a creatively scorched tortilla. On another level. it is a parable of faith that could occur in any era: the holiness of the tortilla is a controversy that plays itself out on the stage of the skeptics versus the zealots. The tortilla could be nothing less than a miraculous object, the result of a heavenly encounter on a gas-top stove. Or it could be an overly celebrated edible Shroud of Turin -- a curiosity at best -- in which the face of Jesus can be seen depending on the viewer.
![[On the set]](cast3.jpg)
Writer-Director Lauren Ivy Chiong, Mario Gonzales (as Father
Hernandez),
Adelina Anthony (as Margarita), and Julio Cedillo (as Roberto)
on
the set of Holy Tortilla. Photo by Ed Bird.
Anyone can decide for themselves whether the face is really there or not. If it isn't, then this is the story of how the power of Margarita's imagination leads her on a spiritual journey. It shows how the act of creation itself can affirm the sacred as a part of our lives. If it is there, then something wonderful, mysterious, and unexplainable has occurred, which can ignite our deepest questions and which restores one young woman's faith in God. In the end what began as a novelty becomes a miracle: the curiosity, then fascination and reverence, surrounding this unusual event bring the community together, and through an act of faith Margarita realizes that the good things she thought were missing from her life were there all along. But above all Holy Tortilla is a tale crafted con mucho amor -- a celebration of the hope and joy found in life's most unexpected moments.
