Juan Pablo Daranas Molina

Project

The Other Family (La otra familia)

THE OTHER FAMILY is my thesis short film from Tisch’s Graduate Film Program. It tells the story of a Cuban family that loses everything after thieves empty their humble home. But when their son sees a girl at school wearing his stolen shoes, the family regains hope of retrieving their belongings.

THE OTHER FAMILY was born out of personal experiences I had while growing up in Cuba during the “Special Period”. The end of the Soviet support, topped with the ongoing mismanagement of Castro’s dictatorship, resulted in extreme poverty. And when everyone is as poor as the next person, everything is subject to being robbed: a bottle of milk, a rusty Chinese bike, or old underwear drying on a rooftop... Faced with material scarcity, moral boundaries are challenged, and we are not always proud of what they end up doing. This project is an attempt to flesh out those grey areas through a story that is also universal.

This film is a production of FILA20, a Cuban film collective based in New York City. Our last movie shot in Cuba was selected by Sundance and many other film festivals. The same crew of Cuban collaborators will come together again for THE OTHER FAMILY, now strengthened with members of the NYU community. The short film is also intended to work as a proof-of-concept for a longer, feature-length story - receiving support from the HEAR US Awards is our first step in that direction.