Valentina Torres isn’t real, but the people who cross her path in El Paso very much are.
The titular character in “Valentina,” Brazilian American filmmaker Tatti Ribeiro’s debut feature, is a vivacious young woman capable of striking up humorous and insightful conversations with people from every walk of life. And although Valentina is being played by Keyla Monterroso Mejia, the situations she experiences are mostly unscripted.
Serving as the opening-night presentation at this year’s Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF), “Valentina” earned Ribeiro the Someone to Watch Award for emerging directors at the most recent edition of the Film Independent Spirit Awards. Recently, actor Jessica Alba pledged her support of “Valentina” as an executive producer.
The idea to create a docu-fiction where a character is inserted into real-life environments to interact with unsuspecting locals came to Ribeiro after spending long periods of time in El Paso as a journalist covering immigration. Observing what happens in this “quaint little town” on the border, she says, is crucial to understanding global geopolitics.
And though the reporting coming out of there during the first Trump administration often seemed bleak, Ribeiro’s memories of those days in El Paso are joyful because of its people.
“I knew I would have to do some version of a hybrid in order to get the experience that I was having to come across,” she said during a recent video interview. “And as a journalist, I don’t want to be in the story at all. I thought, ‘We could do this with an actor and control certain things, but then let the best parts of El Paso be themselves.’”
For a scene where Valentina has an encounter with a tow truck driver, they simply called a tow yard hoping someone interesting would show up. For the psychic who does a spiritual cleanse on her, they were lucky to find one who agreed to have his face on camera. And for a sequence where a strapped-for-cash Valentina visits a blood bank for the first time, they ran into a group of Spanish-speaking people who encouraged her to not be afraid.
“These people are walking into a scene that they don’t know is a scene. We’re not miking them. We planted mics and hid some cameras, and a producer is like, ‘We’re shooting a documentary. If you see some cameras just ignore it.’ There was no pressure on them to perform,” Ribeiro explained. A climactic city council meeting is also real. They planted Monterroso Mejia and filmed her from afar in the area dedicated to the journalists.
A California native, Monterroso Mejia was not familiar with El Paso, and yet getting along with the locals, mostly Latinos, felt familiar. There was no need for adjustment.
“It felt like, ‘Oh, these are my uncles, these are my cousins. I know these people,” she says on the same video call. “Everybody’s kindness and willingness to help comes across because that’s who they are. That’s also what I’m used to with my people and my culture.”
Ribeiro says she first became aware of Monterroso Mejia after seeing her in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Her sense of humor resonated with the director.
“The way that Keyla responds to things, how she thinks about a joke, her timing, her tone, all of it really gets me,” she said, adding that Monterroso Mejia being a bilingual speaker made her the ideal performer for the role.
Monterroso Mejia, however, didn’t initially immerse herself in this singular project.
“I didn’t want to say yes, I was really scared. Working with Tatti came pretty early on after ‘Curb,’ and I was not very sure of myself as an actress or very comfortable in this format,” she said. It was the unique tone and approach that ultimately enticed her to take a chance. “It was like, ‘Even if I’m really afraid, I have to say yes. Even if I don’t feel ready.’”
The actor’s real-life brother, Nathan Monterroso, and father, Juan Carlos Monterroso, portrayed Valentina’s sibling and parent on screen. Ribeiro leaned into their on-screen chemistry as a family unit when creating a sizzle reel to get financing for the project.
“My brother was like, ‘I love you, whatever you need.’ And then my dad was like, ‘When I was younger I took acting classes. I’m a thespian,’ so there was not really convincing on his part. He was pretty up for it,” Monterroso Mejia said while comically rolling her eyes.
The playful relationship that Monterroso Mejia and her dad display in the film reminded Ribeiro about her own bond with her Brazilian father. “Wherever your parents are from, if you’re a first-generation kid in the United States, that is the dynamic,” she said.
Ribeiro’s father never spoke about the difficult moments in his life as an immigrant in a tragic manner. “He doesn’t feel bad for himself, so I don’t,” she said, noting that she holds immense respect for her parents but has never seen immigration through a “lens of pity.”
“The trouble with so much immigration-focused stuff, Latino-focused stuff, is there is this lens of pity that sets the tone of the dynamic and how they approach people and how people feel they need to represent themselves,” Ribeiro explained. “My dad is so funny. He is a full person. Is he a carpenter? Yes. Is he sitting at Home Depot? Yes. Is that his day-to-day life? Totally. But is he also an amazing musician who thinks he’s better than everybody at what he does and is just like, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t make it’? Yes.”
Those convictions inform every exchange that Valentina has with El Pasoans. One early scene at a diner shows Valentina chatting with a group of immigrant men who have just crossed the border. It exemplifies how the film treats its subjects as complex individuals rather than engaging them with condescension.
“They had just talked about, ‘Yeah girl, we just rode that f— train.’ And I’m like, ‘OK, but what about a [Brazilian butt lift]?’ And then it takes shape,” Monterroso Mejia said laughing. “In a traditional film, people would harp on the fact that they just came from a very dark journey and that they don’t have work.”
“That’s what happens when you don’t put a camera in someone’s face and be like, ‘how f— up was it to cross the border?’” Ribeiro adds. “You give them space to be normal people.”
For Monterroso Mejia, becoming Valentina didn’t necessarily entail playing a character, but leaning on her lived experience as the child of immigrants existing in a bilingual place like Los Angeles.
“A lot of it was just feeling comfortable being as much of myself as I could in front of a camera, which took a little bit of an adjustment,” she said. “There couldn’t be this facade of trying to play a person. It was just like, ‘You really relate to these things and these people, and you just have to let that take over.’”
Ribeiro believes her film only works because of the down-to-earth truthfulness and lack of judgment with which Monterroso Mejia handles herself. “Keyla is the epitome of this. She’s the nicest, kindest person and people are so kind in return to her. It was really beautiful. I made a much more earnest movie than I thought I could,” Ribeiro said with a chuckle.
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