Camino

“Camino” is an ode to the single mother/only daughter bond. This intimate road trip short bears witness to the often fraught yet deeply loving and ever-fluid relationship between a South American mother and her first-generation American child. This story emerged when my own daughter and I started to feel the magnitude of her impending departure from the nest — and proceeded to process as we both know best.

We witness the tensions and unspoken trauma embedded into the pair's layered kinship through musical choices, their bilingual communication, and production design elements. As musicians, both characters express and process their feelings through songs. Their differing musical tastes reflect their generational, cultural, and personality differences; the overlap, their affinity and shared history.

The story was conceived of as 3 movements: discordance / wind / harmony. At first, Juliana and Luz are at odds. Their needs clash. They bicker. The light is cold, there is visual space between them.
Their sparring energy shifts when a third person brings perspective and movement to the equation. We see a new side of Juliana: the raw beauty of her singing self, and her adult/woman self as well. Luz’s maturity and capacity for insight emerge. Closeness is recovered in an interplay of blues and golds. Lastly, we have harmony. In the clean golden light of a new day, the separateness has dissipated. The final farewell scene is a shared, bittersweet experience. We started with separate shots of the characters’ hands in tension; we end with both their hands coming together… and then apart.

“Camino” offers a different kind of immigrant story, portraying a woman who is both an artist and a queer single parent to a child raised in a new country—while still holding the inevitable cultural and generational gap inherent in such a bond. This delicate and deeply personal relationship study offers a ride along the messy, often painful proposition of parenting with a heart fully open to the world’s joys and sorrows.