A director portrays the teenage years of María and Anghely, two sisters who live in the mining city Cerro de Pasco in Peru. Through games with them, she questions what she learned a woman should be in her own teenage years.

Volver a crecer is a non-fiction feature film set in Cerro de Pasco, a mining city in the highlands of Peru. The film follows sisters María and Anghely as they move through their teenage years, showing their final years of high school. Through them, the film explores how ideas about being a woman—motherhood, marriage, and sacrifice—are taught from a very young age and begin to shape girls’ futures long before they are able to choose for themselves.

As the story unfolds, the director steps into the film not only as a narrator but as a character. She returns to her hometown asking herself a personal question: do I want to be a mother, or do I want to be free to choose something else? Through interviews, games, and staged moments, she searches for an answer that comes from her own desire and not from social expectations. A chorus of adult women appears throughout the film, representing past generations who lived under the same pressures. Together, the film asks what women today are really looking for—and whether imagining a different future is possible.

I grew up in Cerro de Pasco -a mining town more than 14,000 feet above sea level, in the central Andes of Peru- until I finished high school. Migrating to Lima, Peru for my studies and later to Texas, United States gave me the distance to rethink my childhood in Cerro de Pasco and to recognize how my environment had shaped my worldview. In both places, I met women from different parts of the world, and I began to question the narrative I had learned about what it means to be a woman.

When I returned to my hometown in the central highlands of Peru in 2023, I understood more clearly the cultural differences that had shaped me, and I wanted to offer the teenage girls of my city—girls who could have been me—the possibility of imagining different futures. The narrative I bring to the table is one that, based on my own experience, tells women in my city and in Peru that we must be mothers and wives above all else. I want to challenge those limits and show the diversity of possible paths, something I was able to see more clearly once I left my city.

Finally, I want to tell the story of Cerro de Pasco beyond its mining significance and environmental issues. I want the dreams of the girls and women of this city, 4,380 meters above sea level, to be heard.

This project is my MFA thesis in Film at the University of Texas at Austin. So far, we managed to make the first trip to Cerro de Pasco with a small crew in December in 2024. That led to a first cut of the film (that is the material we showed you in our video). Now we need to make the last trip to Peru to finish filming the movie!

After more than two years working on the project, we know we can make it! Also, between us, we’re excited because once the film is complete, it will be the first feature directed by a woman from the region.

While we are aiming for $6,000 with this campaign, if we were able to raise more than, that the funds would go towards post-production and distribution of the film.