Watch on Deadline
DEADLINE: Where do you think you got your passion for filmmaking?
Are your parents creative?
I was a very voracious reader.
Gabriela Short FilmEvelyn Lorena
And I started acting in plays.
I think my passion for it came from this idea of really wanting to understand other people.
I was fascinated with how people were able to be so different.
Evelyn Lorena inGabrielaEvelyn Lorena
Nobody in my family [has a background in filmmaking].
My parents struggled very much with me doing this until recently.
And my father was like, You just figured this out for yourself in a strange way.
DEADLINE: What inspired you to makeGabriela?
LORENA:I was concerned with the way representation was in the media.
And then it got even more complex as I was facing health issues with my own life during shooting.
It doesnt have to just be Latinos.
DEADLINE: You are a recipient of the Netflix and Latino Film Institutes Indigenous Latino Fellowship.
Can you talk a bit more about that?
I had been working on the script already, a couple of months before that.
Im dealing with all this health stuff.
How do I manage it?
It was like a little sprinkling of encouragement.
But that just came about by literally just an open call.
DEADLINE: In other interviews, youve talked about overcoming your health issues a bit.
How did you get through that and continue the filmmaking journey instead of leaving it all together?
I think it was just the way that things lined up.
I did have the moment, as I said when I was in the hospital.
That was several months of my life in rehab and things.
And I just chose to keep going.
That was really important to me.
And I dont know if its necessarily about positivity as much as inner strength.
DEADLINE: Talk about having this film take place in North Carolina.
Usually, when you get these stories, they focus on California, Texas, Florida and New York.
LORENA:I have family right there in North Carolina.
Those are their own experiences, thats great.
I just wanted to see something a little bit different and that had a lot of complications.
Especially when people would have an enormous amount of microaggressions thrown at you constantly.
And then when my parents came, even more so where you had overt racism.
Nuance is important to me, even when talking about villainizing something.
I wanted to feel like it was also a lived-in place.
DEADLINE: You show the nuance of the multi-generational experience, too.
Gabrielas mom isnt really supportive of her going against the grain.
Gabriela wants the freedom to follow her own dreams.
Talk about crafting that conflict and narrative.
So, Gabriela really believed this was her way out.
And I think the complication came from those two points of view clashing.
I had those discussions with the actress [Maria Telon] about how important that was.
Also, a lot of the inspiration for that was from my own life.
I wanted to infuse that inGabriela.
When people watch the film, thats what they relate to.
Originally, I thought that the film would just resonate with Latinas or something.
But the people who have come up to me the most after screenings have been men.
Which I thought was crazy.
But I guess it speaks to what we tried to do about making that generational struggle a little universal.
DEADLINE: In a coming-of-age story, young characters usually take a stab at express themselves through art.
How did swimming come to the forefront forGabriela?
LORENA:I love the idea of water.
Water to me, has been very healing.
So, that was the first original impulse.
I knew I wanted to do something with water.
In terms of her being a swimmer, I think it was arbitrary at first.
And it felt a little bit vain to me to do it that way.
For myself, not because other people.
Other people can do it, just for me, it felt that way.
I needed to distance myself a little bit from it.
So that was the second one.
DEADLINE: What would you like audiences to get from your short film?
