_Nuevo Rico_ has its world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival today, March 16th. The animated psychedelic short tells the story of a brother and sister who are launched into reggaeton stardom, but the journey isn’t all glitz and glam. The pair have to navigate their new lives together as superstars in the music industry and try not to get torn apart as a cause.
Set in a future dystopian version of Puerto Rico, the short depicts the Caribbean island in an unexplored way. _Nuevo Rico_ is not a look into the future of Puerto Rico that is rooted in their current problems but instead is a look at what a fictional future of Puerto Rico _could_ be.
This futuristic kaleidoscopic journey has Latinx characters on-screen and off-screen. A cast and crew of Latinx people further celebrate this film’s message and story.
Read _Flaunt’s_ conversation with _Nuevo Rico’s_ director and co-writer Kristian Mercado Figueroa and executive producer and lead voice actress Jackie Cruz below!
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**What drew you guys into working on this project? Kris, I know you created the story and you co-wrote it, so what got you inspired to tell the story?**
_Kris:_ I was just wanting to see something wild and new in the world. I've never seen reggaeton in a cinematic language. So I was just trying to approach it from that perspective. If I'm real about the story behind it, I kind of was just writing a feature script about reggaeton, kind of more in the real world, and since I was thinking about reggaeton so much, I had kind of like a fever dream type of situation where I had this crazy impulse to just make a wild reggaeton short as a kind of a palate cleanser from the intense journey of writing a feature that was about reggaeton. It was way looser in approach where I was just like, how can I make this fun and feel like a sense of joy, but make it complicated as well. And so I just wanted to make something that was visceral, where it felt like if I could make grind like perreo and like a dance floor, like, physically manifest as a film, this would be it.
**Jackie, what inspired you to work on this project?**
_Jackie:_ He came to me early. It was probably black and white when I saw it, and it was just his idea.
_Kris:_ She was ride or die.
_Jackie:_ Yeah. It's a dream of mine to be in animation and the character spoke to me. Spoke to me as a human. It spoke to me as a Latina. It spoke to my heart. I wanted to create it with him. And then he's like, how can we do this? And then right away, we just started. It took us a year but, Kris can talk about all the animators. They were all based in, is it Latin America, all of them?
_Kris:_ Yeah in different parts. It was like a Latin American Voltron. We had dudes from Colombia, Mexico, Philly. Philly—not so the Latin American Voltron \*laughs\*. The dude that lived there was Filipino, so that was what's up. And then where else? Puerto Rico. I mean, it was kind of an amazing Latin American effort in terms of just the scope and size of ideas. I mean, I love seeing the credits, because it's just so diverse. The minute you see the credits, you're just like, wow, like, this is incredible.
**This film explores the Puerto Rican future in a new way. Can you guys talk to me about what that means to you guys?**
_Kris:_ It's called _Nuevo Rico_, which really translates to new rich. There's a character arc in the story that's kind of this idea of new money, which is something that I think new artists have to deal with constantly. The dangers of that and how does one navigate that, especially when you're often coming from a community that might not come from much. Then suddenly, you're thrusted into a world where you have a lot, and then it's a difficult thing to navigate.
But the idea and the concept and the philosophical idea of _Nuevo Rico_ is also about projecting the future, seeing ourselves in the future. It's kind of like Sun Ra. Sun Ra would sing about going to space, and there was something beautiful about that, this idea of going to Mars, going to other places, even though it's like a musical impulse, the thing that it says about us as a people in our culture, in our society, I think it’s an odd idea that people don't think of minorities in the future sometimes. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but I often see sci-fi and wonder where are all the brown people. So I think that's also part of it, seeing Puerto Rico in the future. I'm fascinated with my home, because it's a small place, but it's also like I see that place in the future, I see it existing somewhere beyond where it is now.
_Jackie:_ It's beautiful and it's also coming, as an actress, not seeing things like that and not believing that we could be a part of a new world and taking it further than anyone's ever taken. The first thing \[Kris\] said was that you’ve never seen anything like it, and you've watched TV, you know what I mean? So, right then and there it's just something unexplored that I never thought I could be a part of as a Latina. I think it's such a universal story that a lot of people are going to feel that heartbeat of the island and see this story we're trying to tell, which is beautiful, and tell the stories of our Gods that I literally had to learn more about while doing _Nuevo Rico_. I explored all these new Gods, I'm like, whoa, our people were mad cool, Kris, like that's awesome. Like {Kris} said decolonization a little bit and showing us who we were before all that but in the future. That shit is crazy.
_Kris:_ There's something funny about that idea of using futurism as a device to tell a story about who we were.
**Jackie, I think you use the word unexplored whenever you describe the story of this film. Do you guys think that you're going to explore themes like this, and stories like this in future projects?**
_Jackie:_ Absolutely. Every time that you talk now I get like goosebumps because I'm just so excited about this project. I think that it's going to open a lot of doors, not only for us but open ideas that people really have never been able to tell their ideas and explore these new worlds. Maybe you think it's not going to sell so you're afraid, no, we actually took our own money and we created this. Kris put in, I put in like, this is a family story.
_Kris:_ We all bled a little bit \*laughs.\*
_Jackie:_ Yeah we all bled a little bit! It's our blood. I'm Dominican, I do have family that's Puerto Rican, but that's not the point of the story. The point of the story is _Nuevo Rico_ and what the future is, and who we used to be, and how we are still connected. You know what I mean? So I love that and Vico is Puerto Rican and Jamaican.
_Kris:_ The actor who plays Vico, Antonio, he’s Jamaican Puerto Rican, which to me was a beautiful thing, because it connects the Caribbean. Dominican and Puerto Rican actress, Jamaican Puerto Rican, that's part of what _Nuevo Rico_ is, this idea of who we are in the future and how we expand. Puerto Ricans are mostly at this point diaspora so we're kind of wanderers taking our home everywhere we go.
**What are you guys most proud for viewers to see once this short film comes out?**
_Jackie:_ The music, though. The story, I don't know. I'm feeling more proud of our voices being heard. That we never could be in that lane. Putting ourselves in our own lane, first in line to a lane. That's pretty dope.
_Kris_: I'm proud that we finished it. It was a monumental effort. It took a year to make it so like, from script to page to final print about a year. My co-writer, he posted on Instagram, the first draft of the script and it was literally like a year ago, and I was like, what the hell, that's crazy that we could kind of keep working on this for a year as a labour of love was to me a proud moment and just the idea that there was so many people willing to put their time and effort. It's not a mainstream project, it's not something that people are making money on. It's this labour of love like most short films are, so that the idea that there was such a unified belief with so many people involved and that we were able to take it to the finish line. I'm really proud of that.
**Do you guys have a favorite memory from putting this all together?**
_Jackie:_ That's funny because I was in Mexico actually planning a random wedding with my husband now. He's trying to talk to me, like, this is what I need, this is the character, blah, blah. And I'm like, okay, and then I'm recording it and chickens are going off and all these animals, cows, I couldn't send it, because I didn't have the correct Wi-Fi and it wasn't working. So for me, the most stressful time was creating the voice for Barbie, because, number one, I wasn't focused there yet, but finally when I worked on it throughout my wedding and then I came home and Kris helped me find her voice. I think that's the most special best memory, I have just him and me, both of us being happy with the voice we found there. We had to actually record it twice because the first time, I can't be my own producer, I didn't record it right. You know, because it's COVID, and I had to do it all myself. And so we had to do it all over again in a booth. But we got it and we finally got it, it was very hard. But for me, the best memory was creating Barbie and her voice.
_Kris:_ That was a really good memory, I liked that one too. Mine would actually be probably when I first heard the ending theme because I didn't know what to expect. I kind of gave very minimal direction to the artist who made it. And it was cool because we have two female reggaetoneras in it that are kind of like relatively unknown so that was a cool thing to have that in the film and they made fire abstracts. For the ending theme, I basically told her to make us a reggaeton lullaby, and when I got back the track and then saw it connected to picture and sound and all those things it hit me on an emotional level. For all the joy and craziness of the short, I think the ending feels pretty profound and lands in this intense way. Part of that is carried by the song. So when I heard the song, I was like, wow, I got really excited. And I remember feeling like oh, the journey kinda is ending finally.
**Do you guys remember how you felt once you first watched the project from start to finish?**
_Kris:_ We had a watch party over Zoom. I remember this, there was a lot of people on the team, which is crazy to think about, who hadn't seen all of it put together because so many parts were moving separately, like individually. It was kind of nuts for me to realize that because it was such a COVID production, that there were literally people who hadn't seen the whole thing put together. They were just working on their individual pieces. When we screened it the reaction from our team was really really intense. I was like, oh, we got something because the way they reacted was yo, what?
_Jackie:_ They couldn't believe it. Yeah, they were more impressed with other parts than with their parts. It was just a lot of love and like, whoa, you did that. Shut up. You did that. You know, it's really cool to meet each other and to see who was behind it. Like, oh, that a girl did that? They're cool. You know, and it was beautiful.
_Kris:_ We had a lead female designer. She's Puerto Rican-Venezuelan, and she designed the characters and she's really cool. She has really beautiful things to say about it and I don't speak for her, but one of the things she talked to me about was how she works a lot in animation studios and oftentimes they don't have her draw BIPOC representation, or it's just a struggle to kind of get those type of characters approved sometimes. It's a whole whole thing. It sounded like from our conversations when she was working on this project, it was kind of a joy being able to create two characters that kind of represent something real or authentic about Puerto Rico and being able to show a spectrum of Puerto Rican identity.
**When you’re writing this, are you imagining how it’s going to look in the end?**
_Kris:_ I'm a very serendipitous kind of creator. I was building parts of it knowing what it would look like and then other parts were discovery. I think it's hard to create workflows in animation that allow for discovery, but I'm pretty much a proponent of it because I work in live-action as well. Live-action allows you to kind of discover things and animations, sometimes it's very rigid, but I try to loosen up animation so that there can be a sense of discovery. So we were definitely pushing aesthetics to places that we felt would remix and constantly like— sometimes I would make something and somebody else would interpret it and then we would bounce it back to somebody else. And sometimes we would do analog passes of shots. Sometimes we’d draw over animations. Just philosophically, I love mixed media. So I think being able to kind of cross-pollinate styles and things allows for us to discover new things.
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