“An inventive, delicate tribute to family and creativity.”

For some artists creation is a choice, while for others it is a form of survival, a means to comprehend a confusing and hostile world. It seems that William David Caballero is aligned with the latter impulse, as evidenced by TheyDream, his audacious directorial debut and an extraordinary documentary in which he transforms decades of family history (as well as the grief that comes with watching your loved ones get taken over time) into a deeply personal visual essay, shaped by the urgent desire to make sense of these losses through the act of creating art. The film emerges from absence, as Caballero has lost many loved ones, including his maternal grandparents and his father. Over time, he has immortalised them by combining recordings of their conversations (of which he had many, noting that he made sure he had a voice recorder present at every family gathering) with various forms of animation. Art has become a refuge and escape for the director, the channel through which he explores his personal quandaries, posing the questions he is usually too hesitant to ask outside his studio. The film is primarily formed as a collaboration between the director and his mother, Milly, whose own life has been shaped by caregiving, endurance and decades of quiet emotional labour. Now she is the subject around which this film orbits, our entry-point into a film that is not merely a family chronicle, but an archaeological excavation of memory, in which Caballero and his mother evoke fragments of their shared familial history as a means to understand their identity, determined to find their roots through exploring the past in vivid detail.

There are many ways to define the word “home”. This is central to the premise of TheyDream, which begins and ends with the director discussing two different homes in which his mother lives. The first is the mobile home, across the country from where Caballero lived, a ramshackle building in which she still has pride, despite the fact that it’s falling apart. The second is the home that the director bought for his mother, allowing her to not only live much closer to him, but also (in her own words) “start living the life I deserve”, a beautiful sentiment with which anyone who sees this film will wholeheartedly agree. For the director, home has many meanings – it’s the physical place defined by his Puerto Rican identity, and where he made the most formative memories. It is also an emotional state, a place built from memories, rituals and stark realisations of the nature of life. This all points to the central theme of the film, which is that of family – Caballero sets out to tell an intergenerational story, using what records he has of his departed relatives, and piecing them together with the help of his mother, with whom he constructs this tender tribute to those who they have lost. TheyDream is a film that is more than willing to confront difficult family realities, which include illness, unresolved tensions, prejudice (especially his father’s hurtful comments to his son, who was still trying to make sense of his identity) and ultimately, death. It does so with honesty and integrity, never defaulting to any form of sensationalism or blame, and instead attempting to capture the moments of both tenderness and conflict that defined his life until this point. In this film, grief co-exists with humour and affection, being a powerful portrait of a family that the director refuses to mythologise, instead drawing out their unimpeachable humanity (depicted in reworked adaptations of the conversations conducted in everyday moments that become the core of the narrative) and celebrating them with pure sincerity.

Along with making a tribute to his family, the director is also motivated to explore the act of creation. TheyDream is constantly circling back to one central question: can creativity heal us, or does it simply soften the pain of reality enough to make life bearable? Caballero may not have the answers, but he does what he can to provide guidance, both for his own sake and for the audience, who will undoubtedly find value in his perspective. The decision to recreate conversations with his deceased loved ones is not just an ornamental choice or a quirky novelty, but rather a crucial narrative tool, since it adds emotional and symbolic layers to a narrative that is only enriched by his efforts to explore the past through his art. These people are not going to return, and all he has left are the memories, as well as the voice recordings that he diligently curated over time. Bringing them to life using animation – which includes motion capture, 2D drawings, 3D renderings and stop-motion using the miniatures he spends an enormous amount of time putting together – is his opportunity to turn them from memories contained in the past, into unique pieces of art. This gives the film a sense of structure and purpose, with the multimodal approach blending archival footage and newly crafted animations, lending the film a stream-of-consciousness structure, reflecting the director’s deepest memories. TheyDream actively avoids being just a one-dimensional tribute in which he eulogises those who have passed on, and instead is a purposeful and challenging work told in fragments that present a mostly non-linear summary of his memories, which creates something truly extraordinary.

Towards the end of TheyDream, the director states that “creativity is my addiction” – in a world where far too many people see the creation of art as a trivial indulgence, Caballero is bold enough to say that for him, creation is not just a hobby or a career, but the very key to his survival, since without it he would not have been able to process some devastating losses over the years. We watch the director build worlds and reconstruct voices, the absences of his loved ones becoming the impetus for a truly captivating portrayal of family and the inevitability of saying goodbye. The film is as much about Caballero’s artistry as it is his family, the recreations being his loving tribute to them. TheyDream is a profoundly moving act of intergenerational healing, rooted in some genuine but devastating emotions, allowing us to watch (often in real time) the director’s efforts to let go through allowing his memories to fuel these elaborate artistic projects. Not an act of resurrection, but rather a transition, an opportunity to release the past and allow it to become the inspiration for his creativity. There is a quiet universality that drives this film, one that begins as a deeply personal story about a young queer man navigating his particular domestic and cultural circumstances, before finding elements that will resonate with a much wider portion of the population, speaking to anyone who has found themselves retreating to some inner space as a means to survive a loss or simply make sense of a confusing world. Gentle but life-affirming, TheyDream is an inventive, delicate tribute to family and creativity, understanding that art is not an answer to grief, but rather the vessel through which those harrowing emotions can finally be spoken.