PELACARAS

I grew up in a Mexican-American family where a lot of things were never said out loud, but we all felt them. Silence had weight. It lived in rooms. It shaped us. PELACARAS comes from that silence... the silence around pain, grief, trauma, and the moments we try to pretend never happened. On the surface, the film is about a family disappearing. But it also reflects what happens when trauma goes unspoken... how it can move quietly through a home, passing from one person to the next, slowly taking hold of each of them in different ways.

This story is deeply personal. I cast my own family in the film because they are part of the world this story comes from. My 9-year-old niece, Mia Cruz, plays Camila in her first time acting. My sister plays Teresa, and we filmed inside her actual home. My cousin plays Carlos. Every room, every silence, every scene came from a place that felt real to us.

We made this with almost no budget and with help from the Firehouse Film Collective, a group of indie filmmakers in Chicago who volunteer their time, equipment, and energy to help each other bring personal films to life. This film is the result of that kind of community... built with heart, made with what we had, and rooted in something honest.

I made PELACARAS for anyone who knows what it’s like to grow up around trauma, fear, or pain that no one talks about. Horror gave me a way to tell that story, and my biggest hope is that people see a piece of themselves in it.