Q&A with Melina Valdez

“youth, full” is a sharply drawn vignette of discontent about a young woman struggling with what she wants out of life, family or freedom. We asked director Melina Valdez how the project began, keeping it simple, and whether she ever stands in front of the mirror and pretends to smile…

1) Can you talk a bit about your background, and how you got interested in movies?

I immigrated to Florida from South America when I was young and naturally gravitated to anything and everything art related. It began with drawing and floated toward painting, dancing, writing, photography etc. Movies became a big part of my life in high school as this counter-reality that felt like such an amazing miniature universe, where every type of art could exist in creating something that felt very…human, for lack of a better word. Although I wasn’t sure which aspect of film would suit me best, I knew I loved the story telling and creation aspect so I decided to apply to film school in order to go on that journey of figuring it all out. Films just created a feeling in me I’ve never felt before and I wanted to create that feeling for other people.

2) What was the original inspiration, and how did you go about setting the project in motion?

After I graduated, I had so much anxiety and pressure about making a new film. At school, I was lucky to have a crew, equipment and all my energy focused on my films and the films I worked on. When I graduated, I had a whole new set of responsibilities - definitely hit my quarter life crisis early. I don’t know, I just knew I had to make something, even if it was awful!

At one point, the topic of career + family was being brought up pretty often, it was even in a couple of big films and it’s something I became increasingly interested in - women who may or may not want children but feel like they can’t because of outside circumstances. In recent years, the news has felt overwhelmingly negative, with a lot of negativity toward millennials. One of the criticisms is that we aren’t having enough children to keep up with previous generations. The idea of a character who feels this huge weight about having (or not having) children in a generally light hearted setting piqued my interest. I wrote the script, sent it to my actor friends who I knew had good chemistry and let it unfold.

3) I love how simple it is. It’s hard to pull off simplicity. Was it always this simple? Were there other scenes you tried, either in the writing process or that you actually filmed, that got omitted?

It was always very simple, I just wanted to do something to get my mind buzzing again after a dry creative streak. I thought about what I had and how I could make a short film with it, it was just a three person crew, including me.

I don’t like to over complicate things sometimes just because I know I can’t afford to, cautiously ambitious is maybe the best descriptor for that...there’s little concepts I want to improve on and so I make them in manageable ways. Hopefully all these cautiously ambitious and simple projects will stack together to help me feel prepared to tackle something more complicated. I have so many ideas and I’m constantly learning how to express them.

4) To me, it feels sort of like a prologue or an opening. Have you considered expanding this in some way?

Not particularly! It was definitely a moment in these characters lives that I had a magnifying glass on. Shorts are very special to me because it’s a great way to take a snippet of a characters life and find all the oddities that orbit around it. This short definitely has a lot of concepts I could expand on but I feel like I’ve explored what I had to and I’m ready to create new stories. I might revisit this, especially as I get older and all my friends start having kids.

5) What else are you working on?

Doing a lot of writing! Hopefully plenty of shorts this year and maybe a finished feature in the near future. I have an experimental short about intimacy that blends super 8 footage and animation that’s about to get started, we’ll see how it goes! :-)

Bonus question: Do you ever stand in front of the mirror and pretend to smile? Any success with this technique?

I did it once but it ended up feeling like I was in the sims or something. Other people have success! Everyone should try it and report back to me.

Contact Info:

IG: @mmelinavv