“Under the Same Moon” (La misma luna) (2008) DVD

I first saw this movie on a flight to Dallas for a Blaine Ray workshop and fell in love with it. I still recommend that you watch it even if you don’t teach or speak Spanish! Its PG-13 rating (due to some mild language and mature thematic elements) makes it a suitable option for a high school class. Its 106-minute run time allows us to finish it in two 90-minute blocks with plenty of time to pause and discuss what is happening. I prefer to own the DVD rather than stream it for three reasons: a.) it’s more reliable, b.) it’s easier to start and stop to discuss scenes, and c.) movies come and go on Netflix and Amazon Prime all the time.

I wasn’t familiar with any of the main cast (Adrian Alonso, Kate del Castillo, or Eugenio Derbez) prior to watching this, but that’s often what makes heavy movies like this better. None of the actors or actresses in “Under the Same Moon” are typecast to certain roles, which is something that afflicts many otherwise solid movies.

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I can say that the movie has a happy but bittersweet ending. There are multiple moral dilemmas that confront the characters that can fuel a passionate class discussion as to who was the most selfless and whether or not they made the right decisions.

We teach a unit on immigration in the beginning of Spanish 3. We do “Esperanza” by Carol Gaab as the first of two class novels for the semester. While it’s technically a level-one book, we have found that the discussion of such a heavy theme goes much better in level-three.

The audio is in Spanish although some of the dialogue is in English. Unfortunately there are only English subtitles. I found myself doing more of a Movie Talk (no circling or targeting of specific vocabulary or grammatical structures) throughout the key scenes. You’ll find plenty of opportunities to pause it and talk about topics that you covered either in “Esperanza” or in a general lesson on immigration.

“Under the Same Moon” is an ideal capstone that the students can work toward as part of a larger unit or theme. My level-three students consistently mention it as one of their favorite class activities on their end-of-semester surveys.