I was born on an island that is both a colony and a crucible. In Puerto Rico, everything is political—our air, our language, our silence. But I grew up yearning for something else. I didn’t want cinema that merely rehashed our traumas or romanticized our suffering. I wanted stories that used the Caribbean not as a wound, but as a lens—vibrant, experimental, forward-facing. We are where we come from, yes, but we are not bound to reenact it. My vision is to author a Puerto Rican cinema that is not defined by its identity, but forged through it. A cinema that can come from us, without being about us.

I was raised by a single mother—she was sixteen when I was born—and her strength defined my earliest understanding of love and survival. My father’s absence, though not something I dwell on emotionally, has shaped the architecture of my ideas inescapably. Much of my work circles themes of paternal voids, dislocation, the aching need for reinvention. My inner compass has turned toward fatalism, quantum theory, and the absurd—not out of academic posturing, but because those frameworks feel honest in the face of chaos. I make films that function like riddles or rituals: if they continue to echo after the credits roll, if they provoke unrest, debate, hunger—then they have served their purpose.

To me, cinema fractures into two tectonic plates: the first distracts us, a clean anesthetic for the day-to-day; the second implicates us. It doesn’t end with the screen—it detonates afterwards, in the stillness, in the questions we can’t unthink.

Human consciousness, once stirred, cannot return to sleep. That is the tension I seek to mine. People say “act natural,” as if that weren’t a contradiction. The moment the lens appears, the self contorts. We become silhouettes of who we think we are. Cinema, then, becomes not about truth, but about precise illusions—falsehoods constructed so delicately they feel truer than reality.

My approach is image-first. Composition must speak before language interrupts. Dialogue, if present, should glide like a scalpel—not a monologue, but a rupture. The viewer should forget they're watching fiction. That holy fraud, that verisimilar trance, is what I chase as a director.