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Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Following his triumph with the short film Reverie, US-based Honduran filmmaker Andrés Irías is now ready with his new short film: Perception.
In this new film, the talented filmmaker presents a short that continues his tradition, with controversial content and addresses the topic of migration.
Perception tells a story about immigration from two points of view: Daniela, a Honduran mother who is pressured to emigrate from Honduras with her young daughter; and Alan, an American teenager, the son of a family who teaches him to view and treat immigrants as lesser. Through a non-linear narrative and two points of view, Perception is a study of parallel worlds that suffer from the political pressure of society, resulting in life-or-death decisions.
“It all started with news about the caravans affecting Central America and the United States. This immediately made me consider how to express a true story in a way that would work with the way I write and direct (using editing, time, etc.),” Irías told EL HERALDO regarding how the idea for this short film came about.
Andrés in the middle of directing his short film, Perception.
Regarding the construction of the script, the filmmaker comments: “I decided that two points of view would help expand the relativity of the situation. It doesn’t just affect one demographic, but several. Primarily, for the short film to work, I needed the story to move quickly, and for its 15 minutes to feel like they weren’t. Having two stories makes that easier. It also works with my use of time because the American family experiences the story in one day versus the Honduran family, which takes seven days, but we see how individual actions end up affecting each other. Two worlds that are very distant and at the same time relatively close.”
On the other hand, this story was fraught with challenges, including not creating the concept that all Americans are bad; the same applied to Latin Americans.
“It was a very fine line we had to be careful not to cross, because the focus was on a conversation/debate on the topic, and that only happens if we can all see the story from multiple points of view,” Andrés comments.
For now, Irías says they are already fully working on distributing the short film so it can reach more Latinx audiences. He also hopes it will be selected as an official selection at various film festivals, including in Honduras.
Perception stars Julia Carías-Linares, Octavius Prince, Linda Collins, Mia Rose Chamorro, Steven Aronson, Ryan Meade Key, and Luis Martínez.
In 2019, Andrés Irías participated with Reverie in the EL HERALDO International Short Film Festival, where he was nominated for Best Short Film and won the award for Best Cinematography.