Walter Dominguez on Swoop’s World Primetime

Shelley Morrison and Walter Dominguez

On Thursday, March 21, 2013, at 11 am/PST, 2pm/EST, we are happy to welcome Filmmaker Walter Dominguez on Swoop’s World Primetime, Walter Dominguez and his wife Shelley Morrison (Will and Grace) have spent the last 11 years working on a documentary about Walter’s family’s roots called “Weaving the Past.” Join us as we discuss his film and his journey. Tune in at Swoopsworld.com.
Weaving the Past: Journey of Discovery is a documentary about a family mystery and one man’s journey to find the answers. It’s journey that leads him into a labyrinth of self-reflection as he discovers a past he never knew existed; a time of suffering and courage, of violence and idealism, of revolution and death…. and redemption.

Filmmaker Walter Dominguez finds himself at a crossroads in his life, wondering how to find a new path and regain his sense of purpose. A mysterious photograph connected to his late beloved Mexican-born grandfather Emilio, a kindly and saintly minister who influenced Walter’s life, leads Walter to embark on a quest to unearth answers to enigmas and mysteries surrounding Emilio’s early life.

But what Walter discovers is a dark side of his grandfather’s life that he had no inkling existed, and it turns his perceptions about his grandfather upside down.

He learns Emilio was an anarchist revolutionary, befriended and mentored by a famous Mexican revolutionary named Praxedis G. Guerrero. And that Emilio and Praxedis together were involved in conspiratorial, even violent activities based from the United States against the dictator of Mexico, Porfirio Díaz, activities that helped precipitate the cataclysmic ten year Mexican Revolution.

The documentary traces Walter’s odyssey as he puts the pieces of the puzzle together, the puzzle of how conditions in Emilio’s tragic early life, and in Mexico as a whole, brought him together with Praxedis and motivated their fiery opposition to Díaz; and of how Emilio transformed from a radical anarchist into a Methodist minister, dedicated to changing human conditions through peaceful, non-violent means.

Traveling throughout the U.S. and Mexico, interviewing family elders and American and Mexican historians, locating places and people connected to Emilio’s early life, and eventually discovering Emilio’s long-lost relatives in a mountain village in Mexico, who provide the missing pieces of information to make sense of Emilio’s motives and his life’s mission, Walter himself gradually changes. In the end, having discovered how his grandfather found meaning and redemption for himself, Walter finds renewal of his life and a vision for the future

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