Quinceañera won the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.
The film is an independent drama directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland. It centers on Magdalena, a pregnant teenager whose family is preparing for her quinceañera in Los Angeles. The story connects the celebration to questions about family, religion, sexuality, and the displacement of longtime residents.
At Sundance, the film received the Audience Award as well as the Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic Competition. Those awards helped bring attention to a film that used a familiar cultural ceremony as the foundation for a broader family and community drama.
The film should not be confused with documentaries or reality programs about real quinceañeras. It is a scripted feature film, and its title is the Spanish name for the fifteenth-birthday celebration at the heart of the plot.