Mark Schwartz

A feminist activist organization determined to bring attention to superficiality and the rampant objectification of women in modern American society chooses the 1985 Miss California Beauty Pageant as the site for its disruptive guerrilla demonstration. The group meets in Santa Cruz, Calif., and orchestrates its own competition -- one that attracts media attention and shocks passersby with its thought-provoking and satirical alternate reading of the institution of the American beauty pageant.

A middle-aged fisherman and a young college co-ed fall in love with each other.

Enticed by the promise of jobs and fair wages, 100,000 Filipinos immigrated to the U.S. between 1924 and 1935 to toil on California’s farmlands. Because of the exclusion of Filipina women and U.S. anti-miscegenation laws, they survived the loneliness of racial discrimination by creating close-knit bachelor societies where cockfights, poker games and dance halls served as their entertainment, and by entering into common law marriages.