In Tijuana, Mexico, Laura is accepted to a dance master’s program abroad and has to quickly make a decision. She goes out with her friend, Ana, who assumes that she won't accept the offer because she's still hung up with her ex, José. Throughout the evening in the downtown district, Laura notices various girls that are carefully watching her wherever she goes. Distracted and anxious, she can’t make herself have fun like her friends, and is constantly annoyed by the assumptions they make of her. After an encounter with José later in the night, Laura takes his body to a coven of vampire dancers– the girls she saw throughout the night– and is initiated into the group.
Director’s Statement The image that was the genesis of Ella se queda was a girl being bored at a bar. I think it is a very interesting juxtaposition to have someone that is in a space designed to have fun but they cannot be in that headspace because they want to be somewhere else. Emotionally, it was very tough for me to move to Los Angeles, further away from my hometown, Tijuana, Mexico, from where I was living– especially because I knew that this move would be such a marker for my future. When I finally moved to L.A, I was very homesick and really wanted to go back home, and it wasn’t until a few years later that passed that I finally felt like I had a life for myself in the city. When I was comfortable enough to not go back to Tijuana as often as I did in the past and finally call Los Angeles my home, I sat down and wrote Ella se queda. I finally started to believe that home is where my dreams are, and stopped being afraid of detaching myself from what was well behind me. But this doesn’t mean I’ve left Tijuana in the past– in fact, being distanced to it now has made me appreciate it even more now that I’ve understood how it has shaped me personally and artistically: multifaceted, multidisciplinary– always in different places and never in solely one. With this story, I knew I wanted to execute a kinetic, visually, and sonically strong narrative about the emotional storm and breakthrough one goes through when embracing destiny. I have always loved and feared vampires. There is a myth about a vampire being buried at the Guadalajara historic cemetery that terrified me as a child when I first heard it, leading me to a lifetime of intrigue about this mythology. And I am also from the Twilight Saga generation. Seeing vampires being cool in a contemporary story was revolutionary to me, and other movies of vampires in the 2010s as well have inspired me to explore my own reiteration of a vampire. I love horror and genre as metaphors, and in this story, becoming a vampire is a physical and emotional transformation, akin to the symbology assigned to butterflies. The main character goes through death but also rebirth– the past, death, is colored by monochromatic tones and life, the undeath of vampirism, is painted in color, subverting vintage iconography of seeing literal vampires in gothic black and white and have that world be lush in color, while still playing with the stylization of older schools of filmmaking. Dance has always been very important to me, especially during lockdown, when I had a lot of time to explore movement. I started incorporating choreography as a tool to my filmmaking before Ella se queda, as I choreographed music videos and live performances for one of my best friends, Amor Amezcua (Myuné), the composer of this project. I see dance as a potent vehicle for horror and want to see more of it on screen. Inspired by Climax by Gaspar Noé, I realized that dance could be something euphoric and nasty– something so grounding and primitive but also dream-like– since it is such a physical experience it can represent any emotional condition. Collaborating with professional dancers and a choreographer for this short, I hope I captured raw sinistry, catharsis, and madness that goes with the story and the traditional vampiric myth. If I could hope what a viewer gains from watching Ella se queda, it would be that they’d be either touched, horrified, or surprised– if not all at the same time. Visualizing these emotions is what embracing destiny feels like for me.
