J Paul Johnson
Hummingbirds, a hybrid documentary currently enjoying an ongoing theatrical run in New York City and slated for PBS broadcast July 1, offers up a gentle, verité-style slice-of-its-two-protagonists’-teen, queer, Latinx lives. Those two—Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras—are both the film’s primary subjects and its director-writers, exploring a first-person plural perspective on documentary filmmaking. The result of their work, Hummingbirds, may portend more than it actually portrays, but it nonetheless offers up a new and potentially invigorating model for collaborative, mentorship-based filmmaking while depicting the pair’s shared summer of mischief, allyship, and activism.
Castaños and Contreras—the former from Laredo, Texas; the latter from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico—share much in the fleeting summer days and nights depicted in Hummingbirds. Some of their time is spent in the giddy time-wasting of youth, watching days and nights while away on friends’ couches and local alleyways into an uncertain future. These moments are, of course, to a degree scripted and (for lack of a better word) “enacted” by the two protagonist-directors charting their time together, and they’re presented in the familiar style of cinema verité from which the film predominantly borrows: hand-held camerawork, folk-indie soundtrack (much of it performed by Castaños), and an evocative, languid pace.
Most of Hummingbirds was filmed over eight weeks in 2019 with a crew of just six. Castaños and Contreras, then 18 and 21, respectively, are not just ambitious and talented filmmakers but also artists and activists with a range of interests, and so their film depicts its border-town locale as a haven of creative expression and social activism. Both feel the stress of politics: they see a present and future in which their reproductive rights are jeopardized and their shared border increasingly militarized. Their music, dance, poetry, and and filmmaking provides them both a release from and a voice in the challenges of their everyday survival.
Both Castaños and Contreras are engaging and affable subjects, and the topics Hummingbirds explores—immigration, sexuality, mental wellness, and class conflict, all of these intersected by race and gender—need greater representation, especially from young women living as these two do on a literal and figurative border. Given the film’s short runtime and surfeit of themes, none of them can be addressed in detail, but Hummingbirds still presents a rich portrait of two young women for whom the notion of home is a fragile, tenuous concept.
Like dozens of other recent films directed by Mexican and Mexican-American and gender non-conforming filmmakers, Hummingbirds provides a welcome and necessary corrective to the sensationalist headlines of popular media depicting the border as a site of constant chaos and unregulated immigration. Its and their more nuanced and representations of the region’s people depict their communities as complex and resilient—not just violent and criminal.
Hummingbirds was hatched, so to speak, when filmmakers Jillian Schlesinger (credited here as producer/editor/co-director) and Miguel Drake-McLaughlin (producer/cinematographer/co-director) first saw Castaños’s prize-winning short film Ocean at a local film festival while in Laredo, where they were working with local high school students enrolled in a magnet filmmaking program. From there, Schlesinger and Drake-McLaughlin, along with co-producer Dawn Valadez and editor/co-producer Isidore Bethel mentored the two young aspiring filmmakers through the process of cinematic creation in a unique collaborative mode.
Here’s where representation matters: for communities of artists to become diverse and inclusive, their young need the mentorship and collaboration of those like them. With the young aspiring filmmakers Castaños and Contreras being mentored and guided by a more experienced and accomplished team—one predominantly Mexican-American, Texan, queer, women/non-binary, and Fronterizo in its makeup—their projects can take a flight far beyond a local high school class or film festival.
What Hummingbirds portends in its model of collaborative mentorship and first-person plural filmmaking may be more important even than what it portrays. The film’s candid scenes of singing, dancing, confessing, daydreaming, trespassing, and protesting all memorialize a fleeting youthful summer full of transformative moments. But its method of production, in particular the agency it ascribes to young filmmakers in an apprenticeship model, also suggests a pathway to greater diversity, equity, and inclusion for film’s future. With success, there will be more and more Hummingbirds—and more work from talents like Castaños and Contreras—in the years to come. Theirs is a determination that comes across in their first film together, suggesting a future that may present its challenges but can still shine bright with optimism.
Hummingbirds, winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Film at Berlinale Generation 2023, will be available for streaming concurrently with broadcast on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS Video App. PBS station members can view many series, documentaries and specials via PBS Passport.
