Machaca is a semi-autobiographical live action short film about an immigrant boy in pursuit of belonging through the societal pressures of a typical American middle school. Guided by the grit and love of his single mother as he struggles to balance his cultural identity, he discovers the powerful connections forged through the physical and spiritual nourishment of food.

Through the experiences of our protagonist, Mauricio, we witness the ways in which the biases that surround food, planted by both external and internal forces, foment within him and in turn alienate him from his own sense of individual and cultural identity. We witness a rift form not only between him and Mamá but also how that rift cleaves his own sense of personhood as a son of two different countries and cultures, manifested in part by the vampire mascot, Chupis, for MONSTALUNCH: our version of Lunchables-like meal kits. Throughout the story, we will explore the effects of his nutritional and emotional deficiency brought about by the self-loathing incurred through these biases and his eventual triumph over them via an unexpected friendship.

Machaca is an intimate film with a focus on portraying the entire spectrum of humanity found in immigrant stories so often neglected and tokenized in mainstream portrayals. Using the framework of writer/director Iván Cantú-Villarreal’s first years in the United States after immigrating to the country with his family and extracting the most universal aspects of that experience we will speak on some of today’s most pressing issues affecting all communities and study the way in which economic forces can infiltrate and corrupt even the most intimate of relationships.

Machaca’s world and visual design will be brought to life by our distilled collective memories of food and its power to both form bonds and to alienate as refracted through the elevated visual aesthetic of the team’s significant stop motion background. The project will blend live action with stop motion animation elements in the story’s most evocative moments involving the MONSTALUNCH vampire mascot, Chupis, and its manifestations in the real world by our protagonist’s emotions.

The film primarily derives its inspiration from Ken Loach socially critical films and the personal films of Andrei Tarkovsky, all complemented by the rich visual style of Guillermo del Toro films. 

Our project is also informed by the academic work of Sydney W. Mintz, in particular his studies on the anthropology of food.

Our protagonist, Mauricio, is a ten year-old son of a Mexican immigrant. As a first-generation American, Mauricio contends with the push and pull of belonging to two different cultures and the ways in which the inherent (and at times incompatible) demands of each leave him in a mentally and emotionally-isolated state.

Mamá is a proud Mexican-born woman that made the difficult choice of leaving her country and everything she knew behind to be able to provide her son with better possibilities. As she struggles to put a roof over their heads, she makes her best attempts to provide a loving cozy home within the limited financial means and time available to her.

Min-ju is one of Mauricio’s schoolmates and a hopeful friend to rescue him from the spiral he finds himself in. As Mauricio recognizes that she is fighting internal battles not too dissimilar to his own, he takes a leap of faith to find connection and strength within one another.

The vampiric mascot for our Lunchables-style meal kit manifests in the real world through Mauricio’s imagination as a stand-in for his self-loathing. Inspired by the vampire archetype as defined by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the MONSTALUNCH mascot’s defining foreignness echoes aspects of Mauricio’s identity as well as Mamá’s, bringing to the fore in a cinematic way Mauricio’s internal conflict. This character will be brought to life with stop motion replacement animation within live action scenes.

The core themes of our film are that of identity, community and family as communicated through food. We explore the disruption of these manifested through capitalistic market forces aimed at children as personified by the corporatization of school lunches and their accompanying symbology. Our project will explore the ways in which these antagonistic forces go beyond insidiously corrupting the nutritional intake of children and influence their self-regard in a personal, socioeconomic and cultural sense.

We currently live in a complex world struggling with self-examination of centuries of systemic oppression against gender, racial and religious minorities. With anger, frustration and retribution manifesting as further division and gatekeeping that fractures our communities, Machaca hopes to take a personal tale of identity as experienced through food to highlight the importance of unity and sharing as antidotes to division and isolation.

By helping us reach our funding goal, you will help tell a story that will afford immigrant communities in the United States the dignity of representing the full spectrum of their humanity on film. You will help empower not only the voices in front of the camera but behind it as well as our story will be shepherded by minority represented voices to assure the requisite authenticity and care needed to render the lives of our characters.

Reaching 100% of our funding goal will help us get through shooting and post-production of our project by the end of July 2025. By exceeding our funding goal, you can help take Machaca to film festivals around the country to get as many people to experience Mauricio's story as possible.

Sharing our project and call to action video with your friends and family can be just as valuable as a monetary contribution, and doing both would be going above and beyond!