Synopsis
This is the story of a fourteenth-year-old called Miriam. She’s on school vacation and she’s in love with Jean-Louis, a boy she met on an Internet blog. Her best friend is preparing a traditional fifteenth birthday party and Miriam invited Jean-Louis to attend with her. But one day, Miriam and Jean-Louis decide to meet each other for the first time, and when Miriam spots him in a crowded shopping mall, she realizes he’s black and she doesn’t come closer to meet him.
Miriam comes from a white family but her father is black; she is of mixed race, in a country where an important number of the population is also mixed, like her; but “fixing the race” (getting racially mixed with a white person) is highly encouraged. In the story of the film, Miriam’s family knows about her having a boyfriend, but her mother is expecting a white boy from a family from their own social class. As the date of the party gets closer, Miriam will have to decide if she should take Jean-Louis to the party and face her mother or if she should forget about him, remaining within the social class that she belongs.
The narrative of the film gives us the opportunity to set the conflict that can emerge when individual desire for love is faced with the social desire to be part of a community in which we can feel accepted. Set in an aristocratic, kitsch celebration, we would like to achieve a seemingly simple story, doomed by society’s unsolved historical calamities.
Santo Domingo, our city, is growing impressively fast in the last years. Big high buildings, fast highways and shopping walls are being constructed in the name of progress. But the family pressure to continue the same rituals, the gap between social classes and the difficulty to talk about racism, everything still remains strong. That is why, through film language, through Miriam´s story, we would like to offer a space for reflection about these traditions, which seem to keep repeating themselves, over and over, in human nature.