Identifying Nelson/Buscando a Roberto
About the Project
Identifying Nelson/Buscando a Roberto is my first documentary film and explores the aftermath of El Salvador's 13-year-long civil war. In 1997, when I was 16, I found out that I was one of El Salvador's Disappeared Children, a group of over 1,000 kids who had been forcibly separated from their families during the war. The documentary centers around a week-long trip I took to El Salvador in 2011, where I got to connect with the other Disappeared Children, interview the members of my birth family, and meet the country's president.
Throughout this project, I've worn many hats. In addition to being the film’s subject, I’ve worked on the crowd-funding campaign, created the website, written a treatment, and helped with editing. Working on this project has been both incredibly challenging, but also extremely rewarding. I've learned so much about video production, storytelling, and the creative process. I cannot wait to share it with you when we are done.
How it Started
Unofficially, the project began in May 2010 when I reconnected with John Younger, a former camp counselor of mine. At the time, I had been experimenting with sharing my family’s story online. I ran a website called Ana’s Miracle, where I blogged, posted video interviews with family members, and hosted live-streaming events.
John, who works in TV and film production, came across one of my Facebook posts and was fascinated by what I was doing. On our film’s website, he describes what drew him to my story:
I started reading Nelson’s blog, Ana’s Miracle, to find out why he now referred to himself by two names, Nelson/Roberto. His blog posts and videos about life with his family revealed an absolute determination to share that story. It’s a story that deals with subjects like war, adoption, family, and identity.
It’s a story that recalls events that are larger-than-life and twist in unexpected ways. But most of all, it’s a story about what makes us alike or connected, which is something I began learning about from Nelson and his family a long time ago.
John offered to help, first by lending me some audio equipment and then by suggesting we work on a documentary film together. Without really knowing what I was getting myself into, I agreed.
Kickstarting Our Film
As John and I were trying to figure out how to fund our new endeavor, I suggested we raise funds on this relatively new site called Kickstarter. Kickstarter allows people from around the world to fund creative projects by pledging small amounts of money. We knew immediately that we wanted to try this platform, so in the summer of 2010, I flew to Los Angeles to shoot a campaign video.
John and I spent several weeks working on the video and campaign page. Then, on September 14th, 2010, I launched our Kickstarter project from the stage of the #140 Conference in Boston with the hope of raising $15,000 in two months. Not only was it the beginning of our campaign, but it was also the first time I had ever shared my story publicly on such a big stage.
Speaking at the #140conf Boston
While my talk was met with a warm reception, our funding efforts shuttered. We got a few early backers, and then the contributions all but dried up. For the next couple of weeks, we tried everything we could think of to get more backers, but nothing seemed to work. With a week left and over $9,000 left to raise, our project seemed destined to fail, but then something remarkable happened.
The Friday before the campaign ended, we received a large and unexpected donation that completely changed the momentum of our campaign. Our friends and family started pitching in, and within six days, the project was fully funded. John and I were blown away by the generosity of everyone who donated and were excited to get to work.
Filming Begins
Once our campaign ended, John and I bought some gear and tried to figure out how to start our film. We kicked around a few ideas, but none of them felt right. Then, in February of 2011, I got an email inviting me to a historic gathering of El Salvador’s disappeared children, which took place in March of that same year. While we had no idea what to expect, we both knew this was the place to start our film, so we packed up our gear and flew to El Salvador.
We spent an incredible week in El Salvador, interviewing my family about their experiences during the war and other Salvadorans who had also been forcibly separated from their families as children. We got to meet and eat breakfast with the then-president of El Salvador, Marico Funez. The trip’s highlight was interviewing Suyapa Cruz, a civil rights hero whose court case led to the creation of the Day of the Disappeared Children
The week flew by in a blur, and we soon returned home to start working on the film.
Hitting A Wall
After another trip to L.A. and a few months of work, we developed a strong opening for the film, which we debuted at the University of Chicago in May of 2012. By the end of 2012, we had come up with a potential ending for the film, and it felt like we were making significant progress. However, that feeling would not last long.
It turned out that creating a compelling narrative was a lot more complicated than we could have imagined. We considered many different ways of telling the story and even started a podcast called Inside the Journey to help us work through our ideas, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t seem to make progress. We were stuck.
Learning The Craft
By 2014, John and I had become frustrated by our inability to crack the story. While we had learned a lot from our podcast interviews and had made progress on the story conceptually, we struggled to turn our ideas into an actual film. It was around this time, in April 2015, that I discovered a recently published book called The Story Grid.
I read the book in three days and immediately sent a copy to John; it was exactly what we needed. The Story Grid laid out all of the structural elements that make up stories and explained the critical role of genre in crafting a narrative. Over the subsequent years, John and I studied this material, as well as many other resources, and worked to apply the principles to our film. By 2019, we had created a treatment and a detailed story outline. We were ready to create a rough cut.
Getting To a Rough Cut
While we had been editing sections of the film, getting to something watchable was a different kind of challenge. Fortunately, through John’s work in TV and film production, he was introduced to people interested in helping us bring this film to life.
In 2021, we teamed up with the talented editor Rogelio González-Abraldes, who helped us transform our outline and collection of snippets into something cohesive. In a few months, we had a rough cut that we could review and revise. Over the next few years, we went through the film scene by scene, making changes and improvements until mid-2024, when we finished our second rough cut.
Securing Distribution
Currently, we are working to produce a fine or polished cut that we can use to secure finishing funds, which may involve pitching studios or private investors. Once we have secured those funds, we can use them to obtain the rights to historical footage, score the film, and finalize any other details. While we don’t yet have a release date, we hope to be done soon, and we will let you know via our email newsletter, where you can watch it.
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