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'Dolores'

U.S. Documentary; 96 minutes.

The warm-hearted documentary "Dolores" corrects a historic oversight, giving proper credit to a hero of the American labor movement — and a few other movements to boot.

At 86, Dolores Huerta has both seen it all and done it all. As a community organizer in California in the early 1960s, Huerta teamed up with Cesar Chavez to mobilize migrant farmworkers and form what became the United Farm Workers. She did all this while raising seven children (she had four more when she had a relationship with Chavez's brother Richard).

Huerta organized the UFW-led boycott of table grapes in New York. She helped register Latinos to vote for Robert Kenned in the California primary in 1968, and was next to him at the Ambassador Hotel podium minutes before he was assassinated. Twenty years later, she was hospitalized after being beaten by cops while protesting George H.W. Bush. She also came up with the rallying cry "Si Se Puede" — "Yes We Can — that Barack Obama acknowledged he borrowed for his 2008 presidential campaign.

Director Peter Bratt stitches together a wide array of archival footage, with extensive interviews with Huerta's admirers, most of her children, and herself. Brett goes beyond Huerta's importance to Latinos to chart her championing of civil rights, women's rights and environmental safety (by pushing for control on pesticides that were poisoning farmworkers).

What's most touching in "Dolores" is the discussion of how Huerta's work took her away from her children, and how both mother and children have reconciled that over the years. That element shows Huerta as more than the sum of her historic moments.

– Sean P. Means —

Also showing:

"Dolores" screens again at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival at the following times and venues:

• Saturday, Jan. 21, 6 p.m., Salt Lake City Library Theatre

• Sunday, Jan. 22, 3 p.m., Redstone Cinema 7, Park City

• Wednesday, Jan. 25, 3 p.m., Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City

• Saturday, Jan. 28, 9 a.m., Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City