THE STORY – After 20 years of chronicling his Puerto Rican family, a director and his mother face devastating losses. Through tears and laughter, they craft animations that bring their loved ones back to life, discovering that every act of creation is also an act of letting go.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – William David Caballero (Director/Writer), Erin Ploss-Campoamor & Elaine Del Valle (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 91 Minutes
One of film’s greatest abilities is the way it can be used to turn intangible, nonreplicable elements into something real. With his documentary-memoir “TheyDream,” filmmaker William David Caballero takes extremely personal details from his life and brings them to the screen in ways that stretch the very definition of the word “creative.” Caballero takes the audience on a journey through both his memory and the collective recollections of his closest loved ones, and in doing so, welcomes viewers into his family in a way that’s both vulnerable and therapeutic for the director and highly emotional for the audience. It’s an intoxicating, hallucinatory adventure through the expanses of the human soul.
The director’s family stories form the foundation for “TheyDream.” He talks about the closeness of his relatives and recounts important memories with them. While his entire life is covered, most of what he tells focuses on the latter years in the life of his father and both matriarchal grandparents, who all passed away within a few years of each other. Now, his closest remaining family member is his mother, who lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on the opposite side of the country. They only see each other a couple of times a year, but with “TheyDream,” we watch him discover brand-new emotional connections with his mother, as they reminisce together in the trailer she’s lived in since Caballero’s boyhood.
Caballero is a visual artist with a fondness for mixed media animation. As shown in “TheyDream,” he employs a wide array of styles and types of animation, including hand-drawn 2D and 3D CGI animation, stop motion, green screen motion capture, and even some atypical methods like comparatively rudimentary cut-outs brought to life by simply altering their shape and position in successively-presented still photos. The only consistent quality between his various methods is their vibrant colors and imaginative designs. He also has a clear affection for exquisitely-made models. For the film, he crafted miniature replicas of his childhood home and other important locations from his past. These models are stupendously detailed, and seeing them used as a reference in his family stories is delightful every time.
Another passion, or perhaps habit, of Caballero’s is video and (especially) audio recording. Much of “TheyDream” is made up of audio recordings of Caballero’s family over the years, going all the way back to his childhood. As he grew up, Caballero began documenting many of his family’s interactions himself, including surreptitious conversations and private arguments. In this documentary, the director uses these recordings as a springboard for his animated constructions, using drawings, models, and other artistic renderings of his family. He recreates these moments with the actual audio recordings and visual reimaginings. Several of these animations are drawn from recreations performed by Caballero and his mother, who both play animated versions of themselves and, most notably, Caballero’s father and grandparents. One sequence where he plays both his father and his young adult self shows the queer filmmaker talking to his father about his homophobia, in a raw, ultimately powerful highlight of the film. His mom also plays her own mom in some scenes that are both joyful and upsetting. In these performances of their parents, both Caballero and his mom clearly experience a therapeutic reconciliation with departed family members. It’s impossible not to be deeply moved by moments like the director’s mother saying about a tough memory, “This pain hurts to the core.” It’s an extraordinary act of empathy made visually apparent through their emotional reactions.
“TheyDream” also serves to document the making of the film itself. Caballero set off on this memory restoration adventure and started filming it before he even had a complete sense of the film’s full form. This processing in real-time of typical filmmaking questions and difficulties parallels nicely with the tough discussions and realizations that Caballero and his mother encounter in their filmed interviews. It shows the subtlety generally favored by the filmmaker (although later in the film, in his narration, he starts to put fine points on why he’s doing this project, saying the subtext out loud, perhaps unnecessarily). In a very tactile sense, we literally see the director putting his film together by making his models, deliberately constructing each tiny figurine. It’s as if he needs to hold and feel his memories before he can truly be at peace with them.
The crafted physicalized memories and stunning animated elements are beyond effective and incredibly impactful as a palpably formed interpretation of his dreams and recollections. The film’s extremely well-calibrated tone is sensitive but not maudlin. Before they start their collaboration, the director says to his mom, “Maybe we can work together to create something special.” And with the fantastical, powerful “TheyDream,” they have.
