ATLANTA

Forty films showing the progression of how Latino characters and culture are depicted in cinema will be the stars of a festival hosted by Turner Classic Movies and Chon Noriega, author and film professor from the University of California/Los Angeles.

“Race And Hollywood: Latino Images in Film,” airing on TCM television on Tuesdays and Thursdays, May 5-28, is the fourth in a series of film festivals exploring Hollywood's portrayal of racial groups.

Charles Tabesh, senior vice president of programming for TCM said the film festivals so far have shown “the way in which Hollywood depicts different cultural groups can have a tremendous impact on how those groups are viewed in society as a whole.”

In 2006, the series explored how Hollywood has portrayed African-Americans. Last year, it aired portrayals of Asians. In addition, TCM highlighted Hollywood's depiction of gay images in film in 2007.

 “We're proud that TCM has the library and resources to delve deeply into issues like racial and cultural identity in a way that no other network on television can,” Tabesh said.

Throughout the month, the TCM primetime host Robert Osborne will be joined by Chon Noriega, a UCLA film professor.

Noriega is professor of cinema and media studies at UCLA and director of its Chicano Studies Research Center. He is author of Shot in America: Television, the State, and the Rise of Chicano Cinema (Minnesota, 2000) and editor of nine books.

Since 1996, he has been editor of A Journal of Chicano Studies, the flagship journal for the field since its founding in 1970. Noriega has curated numerous media and visual arts projects, and has helped to recover and preserve independent films. Noriega has received the Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in art history and the Rockefeller Foundation Film/Video/Multimedia Fellowship. He co-founded the National Association of Latino Independent Producers in 1999. He is completing a book on a Puerto Rican multimedia artist, Raphael Montanez Ortiz.