Synopsis: Frankie and Lucky, two young artists navigating love and identity in New York City, cross paths again after years of separation. Their reunion in a bookstore triggers a flood of memories, reopening wounds from their past relationship. As Frankie revisits the apartment they once shared, she reflects on their tumultuous past—Lucky's struggle with trust, Frankie's desire for autonomy, and the emotional weight of unspoken truths.
Pura Sangre (2025) is a lyrical narrative that challenges the viewer to perceive love not as a haven from structural violence but as a practice forged within it. Developed as part of my Master of Arts from New York University, the film uses silence, gesture, and poetry to reveal love’s expansive nature. I view filmmaking as a process of remembering—assembling fragments of lived and inherited experience to cultivate new pathways for belonging.
My creative practice reemerged in 2018, as I documented Afro-Indigenous oral histories in Puerto Rico after Hurricane María. That experience redefined my understanding of image-making as a form of reciprocity: cinema not as extraction, but communion. In all my work, I bridge community and art through an ethos of tenderness and radical imagination. Pura Sangre continues this effort, reminding us that love—in all its complexity—is a political act of liberation.
Pura Sangre has screened at 22 film festivals across North America, South America, Eurasia, Australia, and Africa.
+ Introductory Essay: Queer Cartographies
+ Film Review: A Love Letter to Letting Go
+ Deconstructing Pura Sangre
+ more soon!