Pablo Mejía
2026 HEAR US Awardee
Graduate Film 2027
Pablo Mejía is a Mexican American filmmaker and MFA candidate at NYU Tisch. Their work explores migration, masculinity, and memory across the borderlands and rural Mexico. Their films blend personal history with visual poetry and have screened at festivals and museums.
Pablo has been selected as the 2026 recipient of the Kyoko Arai Fund, a gift made possible by Kyoko and Yuki Arai (NYU Stern '10, MBA), who hope to encourage diverse voices and stories in the film industry.
Project
January 19th
(Mexico, 2026) As the sugarcane harvest comes to an end, the sun rises over the Mayan village of El Ojite. Love is in the air, and it seems everyone in the village is getting it on. Perla, a Tének teenager, longs for her first kiss with Dante, the village orphan. But Dante has dreams of immigrating to the United States, and as his departure draws closer, the ghost of his grandmother keeps pulling his leg in his sleep.
Around them, the world that raised them is beginning to disappear. In the burning cane fields, Los Compas, a lively bunch of sugarcane cutters, pass the time arguing over Shakira, while Leno, the foreman, clashes with machinery operators who are taking the jobs of the workers. Daniela and Austin, two anthropologists from the United States, arrive searching for disappearing stories among the last days of the harvest.
When Perla is gifted The Tattered Novel, a book of poems and stories written in the Indigenous language, she discovers it holds a secret power: as it prophesies, it reveals the dead among the living. On the final day of the sugarcane harvest, Dante prepares to say goodbye to the village that raised him, but Perla and her novel offer an alternative: the search for El Destino, a fabled place in the book where the lost go to find themselves.
