Set Hernandez knew there was something that drew them to Pedro, the social worker at the heart of “Unseen,” but they couldn’t have known that in following him around for a film, they’d be able to process their own story. After having met as community organizers, their lives were intertwined before bringing a camera into the mix as they both shared an uncertain status living in the U.S. as undocumented immigrants, though Pedro had the additional obstacle of losing his sight at 10. That isn’t to say he’s left without vision as Hernandez observes him striving towards a proper degree in the kind of work to assist others like him that has been his longtime calling, not waiting for accreditation to come to the aid of Latinos in need of help after the Las Vegas massacre of 2017 who struggled to navigate a system that was designed with only English speakers in mind.
Over seven years, Hernandez observes Pedro’s own difficulties adapting to a world where nothing is made easy for him, spending four to five hours a day on a computer where he can’t be certain what he’s thinking will come across and he requires a guide for recreational activities such as biking and swimming. When he says “We don’t get the luxury of giving up,” you can’t be entirely sure whether the “we” he’s referencing is either the disabled community or the undocumented that he’s an advocate for, though the point is that despite admiring Pedro’s determination and resiliency, it shouldn’t have to be this hard and a beautiful relationship between the filmmaker and the subject starts to unfold as Hernandez feels more comfortable sharing their personal story with Pedro – and by extension, the audience – so neither feels as if they’re moving through the world alone, which seems like an even stronger possibility when “Unseen” covers the time of the pandemic.
Hernandez starts out looking at the world through Pedro’s eyes, visually replicating the haziness that is part of Pedro’s condition and slyly emphasizes a greater reliance on the other senses that he has to lean on to get by in his daily routine, but the film grows clearer in more ways that one when the realization sets in that they share the same view, a type of clarity that’s bound to come to many more as the film premieres this week on PBS’ POV after a celebrated festival run last year, culminating with a Truer Than Fiction prize from the Spirit Awards. The first-time director spoke about how the project ended up turning them into a filmmaker, intentionally leaving the lens off the camera to achieve the film’s striking aesthetic and holding the film together over the many years when it could all easily fall apart.
How did this come about?
I met Pedro when I was helping to run a professional development program for undocumented immigrants that are young adults, and in that program, Pedro was the only person I knew who was also experiencing having a disability on top of being an undocumented immigrant. Having been an organizer since I was 18, I realized that the movement that I was a part of didn’t really even highlight or include even the experiences of people beyond just their immigration status. And in Pedro’s case, that includes disability. So I reached out to Pedro a year after I met him, hoping to work with him to uplift his story with the film. But over the course of seven years, the film became more than just that.
It really feels like a true collaboration when you take into account how he sees the world in every meaning of the term. What was it like negotiating that with him?
There’s different ways to think about the film as Pedro’s point of view, and people who are sighted have always often assumed that the aesthetics of the film seeks to mimic what it’s like to be blind with Pedro’s circumstances. But I find that unethical and that was never the reason for the blurry visuals of the film. It was always out of a desire to reframe accessibility. The film is about Pedro, so he should be able to enjoy the film just as much as anybody else would and [I thought] how can we play with the idea of accessibility so that people who are sighted won’t lean so much into visual information to make sense of the film, but rather also auditory information?
The other way to think about point of view is that being a social worker, Pedro deals with other people and holding space for their emotions and the film also deals with vulnerability, showing our most authentic selves, so we hope that the first-person approach brings audiences into Pedro’s introspection. What does it feel like to be Pedro? We’ll never know what it’s like exactly, but there’s the song that Eminem and Rihanna [sing – “Love the Way You Lie”], where he says, “I don’t know what it really is. I can only tell you what it feels like” and that approach was what we’re hoping to have with the film.
There’s a big gap between filming. Was that a period to rethink what you were doing?
We were filming 2016 and 2017, and then stopped from 2018, 2019, 2020, even before the pandemic. I’m also undocumented, so to get resources for the film, I realized that a lot of grants had citizenship and residency requirements that I wasn’t eligible for and while these grant-making institutions were supporting immigration-oriented films, they were all created by people who are not undocumented, or have changed their status. So there was a time when I thought, “You know what, Pedro? We can’t make this film. There’s no resources. I tried my best.” Then the pandemic happens, and it was an opening to reconnect with Pedro on a human level, outside of just the film. Every time I’m in Pedro’s neighborhood, I do visit him, even when we weren’t filming and I was able to reconnect with him.
At that time, I realized that I related to what Pedro was going through a lot, so it gave me a new sense of desire and fuel to find a new pathway in terms of how the film is going to get told. Around this time, I also co-founded an organization called the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective to advocate, because I wasn’t the only one who was experiencing these restrictions [as far as applying to grants]. Many other undocumented filmmakers are also going through it [and there’s] an organization called Forward Doc for filmmakers with disabilities that also have similar origin stories, so that’s just a testament to [how] when a story needs to be told, it gets told.
One of the most interesting elements of the film is how you will have these conversations with Pedro about the film inside of the film. How much did you want your own presence to be there?
That’s a juicy question because when I first started filming with Pedro, I was not going to be in the film. It was going to be observational, just really showing how Pedro’s life unfolds from his own perspective. I almost felt like it would be narcissistic to include myself in the film because it’s not about me. But I was also the editor for the longest time and my producing team really encouraged me to work with [another] editor, because they said to me that I was too close to the story and expanding my point of view would be really important. So I ended up working with our amazing editor Daniel Chavez-Ontiveros, who noticed when watching the material that there’s a lot of similarities between me and Pedro. This was just a year ago [in] March 2022, when we brought him on board, so he started pivoting the film, including more of my interactions with Pedro. It showed the dynamics between a person that’s non-disabled and a person with disability [because when] I would try to help him, for example, cross the street, and Pedro’s like, “No, I don’t need your help,” I think showing how Pedro is standing up for himself, not against me, but telling me, “Hey, I got this. I don’t need your help,” and on top of that, the parallels between his story and my story ended up being the reason to include me in the film.
And as a point of transparency, I always felt it important to share cuts with Pedro of the film as part of the filmmaking process, from the very first sample that I made in 2017 up to the final cut, picture lock last year, up to the sound mixing. As a person who’s undocumented and has vision loss, I felt it was important for him to know how his story is being portrayed in a way that’s true to him and when we were doing test screenings last year, there were several cuts when I started putting my presence away. And Pedro and his mom told me, “You should be more in the film. We missed having your presence. We thought it was better when you were in it.” And that was a surprising moment.
Was there anything that happened generally during the process that took this in direction you didn’t expect?
The other [surprise] was how when you tell the stories of undocumented people, there’s often an assumption that everyone is super afraid, which is probably true to a certain extent, but the aesthetic of blurriness was also [born from] a desire to anonymize people who are undocumented, but along the way I want to say [people] were proud or enthusiastic to be in community with Pedro and to be supporting such a beautiful story of such an amazing person and with that desire, folks [would say] “It’s kind of nice that you see my face here” or that person is a little blurry, but when we finally see them — for example, Pedro’s grandma, she’s blurry for most of the film, but there’s a moment where we see her clearly — and Pedro’s family found that moment so [moving], especially because Pedro’s grandma has [since] passed away.
I had assumed that some of those decisions about how to blur this were made after the fact, given how intentional it all seems, but I learned you were making those decisions as they were happening. What was it like to stay attuned to the presentation in that way?
There’s three parts to this response. The desire is to make the film as accessible and enjoyable for Pedro as possible, so from the get-go, 95 percent of the blurriness of the film is actually done in camera, so there was no option in the edit room to a certain kind of footage blurry and that allowed us to be more creative, more resourceful, and more intentional about what this blurriness really means in the context of the film. There were times that I would film without a lens. I was using a DSLR camera throughout the whole seven years that we were filming, and there were times that instead of putting a lens on the aperture of the camera, I would put gaffer’s tape over the aperture and poke a hole, just so that enough light shapes and colors would be captured by the camera. There’s no actual lens with a lens ring and there was no way to adjust focus.
What also emerged was that every time I would film, I would ask Pedro first, “Hey, let’s film during these dates. What’s going on with your life?” And in the beginning, I wasn’t as intentional. I didn’t always know what was going to happen when we were filming and I was not fluent in Spanish when I first started filming, so I would film, and I had no idea what’s happening and it wasn’t until two years ago, during the final shoots, when I would finally be able to have conversations with Pedro’s parents and be more fluent in Spanish. All this is to say, I feel like with any creative process, there’s almost like a spirit that just kind of guides you. Some people call it intuition. But I feel the spirit is more external for me, and what ultimately happened in the edit room is that what we realized is that, for the most part, [the visuals] correspond with moments in Pedro’s life where he feels a lot of uncertainty and there’s moments when we have more clarity when he’s doing triathlon, for example, where Pedro says being running grounds him. He says it allows him to just be present one step at a time, and for that whole scene, the footage is clear. It just so happens that we were able to make sense of which visual language corresponded with which emotional meaning.
It came out beautifully. And it’s shocking to me that you didn’t know Spanish going in, given how much of it is spoken in the film. Were there any moments that really surprised you once you had it translated?
Oh my god, yes. From 2016 to 2021, I was editing [by myself] for the most part and when my Spanish has finally improved around 2021during the pandemic, I started editing and logging footage on the film again to pass time, and for example, the scholarship scene, when Pedro was getting $5,000 when I was filming that, I had no idea why everyone was crying. I just knew that he got money, but I don’t know the context of what the $5,000 meant to them — to the whole family, and to the professor, so when I was editing footage, even I was crying. I shot the footage, but never looked at it until years later and it felt like discovering something that you unearthed from underneath the ground and that sense of discovery, not just for the footage in Spanish, but all of the footage between 2016 and 2017 was really, really magical.
Now buried treasure. What’s it been like to share with audiences?
We’ve been able to screen the film in a couple dozen festivals, mostly in North America, and we [also] had a screening also in the Philippines during the summer. And at one of our festival screenings at Blackstar, there was an audience member who came up to me and she did not share any of Pedro’s identities, but she was telling me how she came into this screening hoping to learn about someone’s experience, which is what a documentary usually does, right? And by the end of the screening, she told me, “I came out of this room feeling like I learned more about myself, actually.” And I feel like that’s the most profound thing that we could ever ask for with how audiences receive the film.
And while we want to reach as many audiences as possible, our big key target audiences are audiences with disabilities and undocumented immigrants because there’s so many films about undocumented people [as well as] about blind people, but they’re not made for our communities. For example, Pedro has told me that with all the films about blind people, he knows they’re not made for blind people because they’re not accessible. They don’t have audio descriptions. Sometimes they actually have Braille written on screen, but [obviously] you can’t touch Braille [on a screen], so it’s an aesthetic choice just for pizzazz. So whenever we get to share our film with audiences that really are underserved in the media landscape, we make sure it’s inclusive.
When we had our opening night at DC TV, it was probably one of the most magical screenings we’ve had because we had Spanish interpretation of the Q&A and of the film. We had ASL interpretation. We had audio description. We had filmmakers. We had community organizers. We had everyday people — children, adults, elderly people. It was just such a wonderful community and we’re realizing that our film almost serves like a Trojan horse for accessibility. When we go to the theater, often our communities are never thought of as primary audiences for film, but by asserting our presence in the theatrical space, it reminds maybe people who run the exhibition space that accessibility is so important and when your theater is not accessible, you’re literally overlooking a big market, even from a market perspective. But beyond a market perspective, an audience narrative justice component is how can we make sure that films about communities are experienced by those communities too.
“Unseen” will air on POV on PBS on March 18th and available to stream thereafter on the POV on PBS website.