Delirios del Desarrollo is a short experimental film that stems from my very personal experience as a Cuban immigrant in the United States. “Y en español para que tanga sentido” is seen on the poster in small writing, the tensions of language are inevitable when creating this type of media. It’s hard to actually translate the title and all the nuances that are attached to it but that’s part of what my film will be exploring, the tension of what’s untranslatable, both linguistically and culturally between my subjects and my audience. My hope is that the language of cinema mediates this discrepancy. Although the exilic experience is at its core similar for many, I find the specificity of each experience the hardest part to digest, process, understand, and translate. It’s also the most interesting part for me, I hope to create portraits that glance into my memories and experience. Vignettes that exist almost as a documentation, bleeding the line between my own life and the directions I give my subjects.

The film is currently doing its festival runs, but a preview can be found below…

This film wasn’t just an idea that came to me, if I’m being honest I never thought I’d end up sharing this much of my real life as my thesis. Somehow the project revealed itself to me naturally. It made sense that this is what I had to tell, what I had to translate into visual art. I immigrated to the U.S. when I was short of being 13 with my dad, my mom, and my two younger siblings. While many people I knew as a kid hoped their dreams would learn how to swim, my parents were fortunate enough to get their dream a plane ticket. We were casted from struggle into struggle, not quite the same kind but struggle nonetheless. I often compare my experience immigrating to uprooting a tree. I can't speak for every immigrant, but many of my own traumas came with replanting my roots. Nine years later I find myself questioning my experience as an immigrant more than I ever had. When we left my mom packed as much memorabilia as she could possibly fit in a checked bag. Now all those special objects fit into 4 small boxes that sit in a closet, in the 7th house we’ve moved into in the last 9 years. How can you fit an entire family’s memories into a couple cardboard boxes? I get the feeling I will never fully belong anywhere, at least not to the extent that the royal palm tree belongs in my homeland. The result is a very eclectic brain, a bunch of misplaced and mismatched objects and memories. Places that I can’t put together. Domestic paradoxes. Houses that don’t feel like my own and homes that feel too confined. People whose faces I can’t quite remember but whose laughs I’ll never forget. A cabinet of curiosities. A collector’s dream, a nightmare for my mental health, and a vanishing point for my art.