We Are Living Things

Director's Statement

WE ARE LIVING THINGS is the natural progression of the ten-year collaboration with Alex Lora. The previous films we collaborated on were rewarding both for their process and their reception, receiving prestigious festival selections and awards (two played at Sundance, one had its world premiere in competition at IDFA). For our first narrative feature film together, we wrote a story about underdogs and outcasts, a theme which in today’s political climate has an added urgency. The drama is entirely set in the United States but its main characters are aliens. In the story, Solomon (Mexican) and Chuyao (Chinese) meet by coincidence and are a generation apart. As the events unfold the characters begin to sense that they ‘know each other from somewhere else’. They both have had powerful experiences that seem to indicate hidden dimensions behind reality, but they don’t know what to make of these experiences or how to share them. Solomon and Chuyao are strong-willed and have had to overcome hardships for most of their lives. In order to survive and to see a light at the end of the tunnel, they are both believers. But what they believe in is not institutionalized religion, it’s the existence of an external, out-of-space life form that could save them. Solomon, who grew up in an orphanage and subsequently in the streets of Mexico City, is convinced that his long-lost mother was abducted by aliens- - which is what he was told by a woman he met in Arizona and with whom he lived for a while as a teenager, soon after he illegally crossed the border. Chuyao, after experiencing an overwhelmingly beautiful yet terrifying episode as a teenager, thinks she was abducted and returned by aliens. The adults around her feared for her mental stability and tried to convince her that she imagined the entire experience. The resulting estrangement triggered her decision to leave China for good.   Our story is an ‘out of time’ ironic fable with a science-fiction element that acts as a metaphor, yet we believe our film also captures something very immediate about the world we are living in right now, the “funhouse mirror” reality we have come to know. It also resonates with the current national and global controversies over migration, protectionism, and border patrols.