As a child, you usually don’t have the option to possess your own agency. However, in the case of a young Dominican American boy, he must choose between telling the truth or lying to protect the livelihood of those he loves. Gianfranco Fernández-Ruiz’s When Big People Lie, co-written by Pablo Cervera and produced by the AFI Conservatory, follows an eight-year-old boy named Elvis (Kaden Quinn) whose mother, Lola (Sasha Merci), has arranged a lucrative for-profit marriage with a Palestinian immigrant (Faruk Amireh) in the hopes of fixing their money woes. When an immigration agent (Diane Sargent) comes to assess the legitimacy of the union, the future of Elvis and his mother’s life out of poverty hangs in the balance.
When Big People Lie has made the rounds at the Telluride Film Festival, the Indy Shorts International Festival, the New York Latino Film Festival, the Boston Film Festival, the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards and the Hispanic Heritage Film Festival Showcase. Here, Deadline speaks to Fernández-Ruiz about his experience with the immigrant struggle and the importance of cross-ethnic storytelling.
DEADLINE: Where did the concept of the short come from?
GIANFRANCO FERNÁNDEZ-RUIZ: It came from so many borrowed narratives of people I grew up with. The reality is, I saw it in my own home – green card marriages. I try to be real protective over that, but that’s the heart of it. There was this industry of people who were in business in Boston in the ’90s. It was like, if you needed money and your job wasn’t cutting it, this was going to bring you an extra $5K. So, I think that was really the start of it – looking at something I experienced and feeling the need to crack that open.
DEADLINE: There’s not a lot of dialogue in the film. How did you find Kaden Quinn and work with him to convey such heavy concepts?
FERNÁNDEZ-RUIZ: I got a dope casting director [Alan Luna]. He is also a producer [of some of my other projects]. He just cracked open the whole world. That was the tough thing; I had in mind these people I had already gone to lunches and dinners with. Sasha [Merci] and I had already met; she’s Dominican, so she’s in my community. Faruk [Amireh], I asked a friend if they knew people who were Palestinian and could connect me with them. She introduced me to a stand-up comedian, and I was charmed by his energy. But, in terms of finding kids, I didn’t know any kids here in LA.
So, our casting director put out this massive call. It was around 700 kids or so, and we boiled it down to about 200. And a lot of those kids are good but getting them down to the final 10 was important because I saw all of those kids in person and took them over to AFI. We sat down with Sasha, where I asked her to help me choose, since whichever kid we picked was going to be the child who played with her. We needed that chemistry. I had my DP [Mko Malkhasyan Miko] record all the interactions so I could see in real time what the chemistry would be like.
Kaden came in, and he spoke about his grandfather, who had passed away, and he got so emotional. He sucked all the air out of the room. This kid brought so much gravity to the piece. He was so raw, and he shook Sasha to her core. So, watching those two interact with each other, that’s when I knew.
DEADLINE: Kaden’s character, Elvis, has a lot going on. He’s afraid he’s going to lose memories of his incarcerated father, while also processing his mother with other men, even if it is a sham arrangement for money. He tends to liken his situation to being in the ocean. Can you talk more about what Elvis is going through?
FERNÁNDEZ-RUIZ: There’s a lot there. My father was incarcerated. I have photographs of my father and me. He’s in a jumpsuit that he looks fly in – he rolled up the sleeves. The photo that we took [at the prison] was us inside of a library study, by this fireplace. I don’t have any recollection of being there. And in [looking back at this photo], I could see that the study looked opulent but also plastic. I don’t have any recollection of being there, either. But it was a prison backdrop that they put in the visitation room. That was something I brought to this film, which is quite poetic. You have a kid with a lapsing memory.
So much of this idea of water in relationship to the kid, in one way, is to [represent] suffocating and drowning, and in another way, being baptized and turning into a man, essentially, and figuring out what that means. The in-between is this lapsing memory, these waves that are coming in and out of what an eight-year-old holds and the collection of his life. It’s trying to process that he has these memories of this guy, his father, who never came back. Then he pairs that with these new memories of this guy, with whom his mom doesn’t have a great relationship, because she’s resisting what this person really wants, which is a partnership. So, he’s navigating the space of thinking that he’s finally getting the chance to have an actual father, but it’s not real.
DEADLINE: Your short features a Latina citizen offering a means to get a green card to a Palestinian man. Considering all the news going on about immigration, how do you think your short plays into what’s going on around the country?
FERNÁNDEZ-RUIZ: I didn’t intend it to be [related to what’s going on currently]. And I think that’s what makes this experience unique. When I made this, I was writing from a perspective that felt true to my own borrowed narratives from my own childhood. I had family members who did green card marriages. My mom happened to work at a furniture store with a bunch of Palestinians. That concept of the leading characters being Dominican and Palestinian was always there. Once, I got this note from a Sundance Film Festival employee, and they gave me this note that was like, “This isn’t really… Do we really need this?”
When we made the short, all of that stuff was set in motion. And I actually think that it really empowered the story across ethnic storytelling and cross-racial storytelling by showing that this is what the world looks like. So often we tell stories that I think can pigeonhole us as people of color.
Janicza Bravo came in and told “white” stories until eventually she did Zola. Or you have the opposite, where you have these stories that are told from this singular perspective that’s specific to culture, and without training, I think a filmmaker over-focuses on those cultural elements as opposed to trying to honor what experience is and what the story is and what those characters are, therefore going through. So, I think that with When Big People Lie, cross-ethnic, cross-national storytelling is what makes it such a powerful and relevant story to everything that’s going on today. I didn’t know that all this stuff would be happening today.
I do not tell stories so that I can be a social impact storyteller. I think that when you’re Black or Caribbean or when you’re from a different place, there’s this onus. Especially when you have our skin color, there’s even more where people are just constantly telling you that you have a responsibility to the pantheon. Or to the annals of cultural history because we haven’t had the opportunity to be the ones behind the camera and owning the image that we’re creating. But I wasn’t looking at the political landscape and going oh, I’m going to tackle that.
DEADLINE: What would you like audiences to take away from your short?
FERNÁNDEZ-RUIZ: This is where it gets dicey. This film does belong in the political space in a way. One might look at it and ask, “Who are these people? Where do they belong?” And at the end of the day, Elvis is American. Lola came to this country and obtained citizenship, but she wasn’t born here. That’s not clear in the short film, but the genesis point of my story is that my own mom is an immigrant who got her citizenship, and I had other family members who used theirs as a point of sale, which is wild. But ultimately, this film is really a story about a boy and his mother understanding how he needs to show up in this world where it’s just them, and there are other relationships there that harken to a different dynamic. The core of this film is that I’m a boy, and my mom is doing everything she can to take care of me. I would like audiences to think about their moms. Now that they can discuss what’s happening in the landscape of immigration and all the other issues that are unfolding, in addition to their own personal relationships with their mothers, fathers, or whoever that person is.
You know what I’m saying? Children face numerous pressures in situations like these, regardless of whether they are citizens or non-citizens. When it comes to policy, there’s an oversimplification of like, “Oh, well, this person shouldn’t have come to this country in the first place. Keep the family together. Take them all the way over there.” Immigrants are contributing to this country and its fabric in ways that we can’t see. So much is focused on the negativity of it all. While it wasn’t at the center of my process of making it, it was always a film that broached the conversation of class, immigration, and immigrants, as well as what they bring to America in a country designed for immigrants. I think that in relation to a kid’s innocence and having to face those things, now they have to compromise their innocence to answer for the things that their parents did, basically. Nobody’s a saint.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]
The post ‘When Big People Lie’ Filmmaker Gianfranco Fernández-Ruiz On Tackling How “Immigrants Are Contributing To This Country & Its Fabric In Ways That We Can’t See” appeared first on Deadline.
