2025-2026 Pragda Spanish Film Club

"Beautifully juxtaposing the realities and expectations of a young girl approaching womanhood in the Dominican Republic, Boca Chica shines a light on the insidious child sex trade and the lives it seeks to destroy.

Director Gabriella A. Moses exposes the community’s complicity by way of twelve-year-old Desi who is constantly exposed to unwanted advances and crude comments from older men, both visiting and homegrown. She works at the family restaurant alongside her mother Carmen, who encourages the behavior, in a once serene beachside town now bustling with foreign tourists."

DIRECTOR

Gabriella A. Moses is an award-winning Dominican-Guyanese American writer and director based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

Gabriella has received support from the Sundance Institute, New York Women in Film & TV, Tribeca Film Institute, The Black List, and SFFILM. She was most recently featured on the 2023 Black List Latinx List and was selected for the 2022 LALIFF x Netflix Latinx Inclusion Fellowship Program with her short Sin Raíces.

Her directorial debut, the feature film Boca Chica (2023), was filmed in the Dominican Republic. The film premiered in the International Narrative Competition at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival, where she won the prestigious 11th Annual Nora Ephron Award.

Gabriella believes in sharing stories with underrepresented protagonists that test viewers’ perceptions of identity and their imaginations.