Lucy “Luz” Molina finished third out of eight candidates in her 2019 bid to join the Commerce City council. Which is not to say she lost.

“I can honestly say that when you participate, you never lose – you just learn and continue moving forward with a mother’s heart,” said the political neophyte who blindly jumped into the race to save her four children.

“My son started getting bloody noses. My daughter started getting stomach aches. Everyone in my family kept getting sick,” said Molina, who lives in the most polluted ZIP code in America – and that’s no exaggeration. 80216, which includes the Denver neighborhoods of Globeville, Elyria and Swansea, ranked No. 1 in a 2017 study from ATTOM Data Solution.

It’s no coincidence that the Molinas live across Brighton Boulevard from the Canadian-owned Suncor Energy refinery, which earlier this year temporarily shut down one of its three plants in an attempt to reduce its toxic air emissions. Nearby is the Purina factory and other polluters. “Life expectancy in North Denver is eight years shorter than the rest of the state,” she said.

Molina’s remarkable transformation from Latina single mother to crusader against what she calls environmental racism is remarkably told in “A Good Neighbor,” a 19-minute film that was included in the Denver Film Festival’s curated program of this year’s top Colorado-made short documentary films – a slate that played to two consecutive capacity houses this week at the Sie FilmCenter.

Molina wasn’t dissuaded by the 2019 election results and vowed to run again. But fate intervened in September 2022 when she was appointed to a vacancy on the Adams 14 school board. Her temporary term was set to expire this month, but because she had no announced opposition, she has been appointed to a new four-year term to run until 2027.

“Because I did not have the political background, the resources or the privilege to have been able to do this in my youth, I just see this whole experience as an opportunity to continue learning with front-line experience,” Molina said. “You’ve just got to continue doing it over and over.”

The message of the well-received film, said Maggie Hartmans, who co-directed with Brittany Zampella, is that if Lucy can do it, anybody can do it.

“We’re not asking anyone to solve the entire climate crisis,” she said. “We’re not asking anyone to solve all of the pollution problems. We’re just saying, ‘Hey, take care of your neighbor. I think if everyone in the world just took care of their neighbor, like Lucy, we’d be in a much better position.”