Director: William David Caballero
Writers: William David Caballero, Elaine del Valle, Brad Jones
Stars: Diana Alvort, William David Caballero, Vic Rico
Synopsis: A director and his mother document their Puerto Rican family over 20 years, facing loss. Through animation, they celebrate memories while realizing each creation involves a painful goodbye.
When directors turn their cameras on themselves, the results can often be messy. However, director William David Caballero uses his unique skills as an animator and stop-motion creator to make TheyDream into a story unlike any other. Using multiple forms of animation to craft the story of his family and bring long-gone members of his lineage back to life for his mother, TheyDream creates an immigrant tale that bursts to life with energy and love.
Caballero channels the history of his family in America, examining important moments spanning twenty years. Using a treasure trove of footage he collected and recorded, Caballero reexamines conversations with his father, who often used homophobic language around his closeted son. Additionally, he allows his mother to reenact voicemails from his grandmother, giving her a new life in the process. As Caballero works to chronicle the family’s history and explore the quiet moments of their life in America, his mother guides him in each new direction.
TheyDream never attempts to portray itself as anything but a love letter from Caballero to his family. He openly recognizes that there are flaws in how his father approached the world, as well as the fights that soured their relationship. Through animation, Caballero explores his own frustrations with self-confidence. He replays the scenario, pinpoints where he could have changed the conversation, and questions why he stayed silent instead.
The narrative crafts moments like this throughout TheyDream. Caballero and his mother, Milly, explore the fraught moments of their lives. As he does this, Caballero begins to understand his family in a new light. While TheyDream is a project that allows him to interrogate his own mistakes, it also gives him new windows into empathizing with those he’s lost.
The actual animation that Caballero crafts is its own magic trick. Using so many types of animation keeps the audience on its toes and allows him to seamlessly integrate hand-drawn figures into miniature sets. Each element requires its own painstaking process. The most obvious are in the stop-motion animations, many of which use figures, and in the unique use of motion capture. As he gets his mother to reenact the last voicemails from Caballero’s grandmother, they find incredible catharsis in the product and the process.
TheyDream is the kind of documentary that should not work on paper. Yet by exploring the incredibly specific events within the family, Caballero finds universality. We all carry grief over the moments we haven’t shared with loved ones after they’re gone. For a brief moment, TheyDream not only allows Caballero to remember what made each of his family members special, but remember what goals they had for him and their family in the future. The re-exploration of these relationships leads to stunning revelations and incredible moments that will make hearts of ice thaw. Stories like TheyDream might be premised on ideas that feel too narrow. However, it’s in this focus that Caballero and his mother find some universal truths about family and the moments we do not want to talk about. We believe that hiding parts of ourselves from our loved ones will cascade them away, but the truth is, we can never know unless we put ourselves in the position to ask.
