I Love You So Much But You Are So Difficult

Te Amo Tanto Pero Eres Tan Difícil is more than a film, it is a deeply personal act of excavation and reckoning. Growing up as an immigrant, tethered to the U.S. by a decade of undocumented status, I felt the Dominican Republic, its warmth, its contradictions, its truths, slipping further away from me. When I finally returned after more than a decade, alongside my mother, it was as if the journey held up a mirror to our relationship, to the layers of identity, longing, and generational pain I had carried for so long.

What began as a simple attempt to document a road trip quickly revealed itself to be a profound exploration of the unspoken bonds that shape us and the resilience it takes to love through inherited trauma. The archival footage I captured, raw, intimate, and imperfect, became a testimony to fleeting moments of honesty and confrontation. It became a space to confront the silences that have lived between my mother and me and to unearth the truths we were both too afraid to name.

As a Dominican-born, Miami-raised filmmaker, my work often bridges the space between memory and migration, home and exile. This film is an extension of that exploration; a tender yet tumultuous reflection on belonging, not just to a place but to a family. It is my hope that Te Amo Tanto Pero Eres Tan Difícil resonates with anyone who has ever felt caught between worlds, between love and resentment, between the weight of their past and the hope for a new future.

This film is a universal story told through a deeply personal lens. For festival audiences, it offers a chance to connect to the shared human longing for reconciliation, understanding, and belonging, making it not just a film to watch, but an experience to carry with them long after they've left their seats.