“El frío me atormenta” or the cold torments me, is the chorus of Making Movies pulsing rock song Tormenta. The song expresses a longing for family and wanting to visit home at Christmas. That’s something that many immigrants in the United States don’t have the freedom to do. It speaks to a difficult situation, but it’s not selfpitying or sad. The song is defiant. It makes for the kind of building, anthemic song that the group specializes in.

Making Movies, whose name was inspired by Dire Straits' 1978 self-titled album, is a truly bilingual band. Their music doesn’t throw the odd word in a different language. It’s not Black Eyed Peas yelling “mazel tov” for some reason. The band crafts powerful fully realized ideas into songs in English and Spanish.

Making Movies’ chief songwriter Enrique Chi, a native of Panama, writes most of his songs in English first. “Writing is a very unconscious thing,” he says. “I live in the U.S. so still most of my day I speak more English than Spanish, so when I go to write a lot of times, it starts in English and have to go from the English to the Spanish.”

Asked to elaborate on when and how they choose to translate a song into Spanish, Enrique’s brother Diego Chi, the band’s bassist, adds, “It’s another tool in the tool box.” If something isn’t working in a song one option they have in changing the sound or the feel is changing the language. “It’s funny ‘cause some of our songs just don’t work in English,” says Enrique.

EXTRA spoke with Making Movies at the House of Blues on a night they were scheduled to open for Andres Calamaro. After the show was cancelled, the band was disappointed, but still excited about ...