la leyenda del sombrerón

I made this short about Guatemala because I was tired of the same stories getting told. Everyone knows the gangs, the drugs, the human rights headlines. That stuff is real. But it's not the Guatemala I grew up in.

What I grew up in were my grandma's stories, late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed. Folklore that felt magical, eerie, sometimes genuinely scary. La Leyenda del Sombrerón was one of those. I wanted to turn it into a dark fairy tale for the screen.

Susana is an orphan. She wakes from a nightmare and slips into a world where she can't tell what's real anymore. El Sombrerón might be hunting her. Or maybe she's imagining him. People warn her. She sees things. She doesn't know who to trust. I didn't want to spell out where the nightmare starts or stops. My grandmother never did.

The stories stayed with me precisely because they didn't tie up neatly. They just... lingered.