Estrella: A Drama on Collective Action and Its Constitutive Parts

Written with Mario Bedwell and Ethan Oh, Daniel Alvarado-Nava’s Estrella, a 23-minute drama about an undocumented immigrant woman’s struggle to receive one of the most crucial services of healthcare, childbirth, divides itself into three segments. Each a vignette of the protagonist’s journey from a bus stop with no bus to a hospital with no care, the film documents a slice of what it is like to be counted immigrant and labourer before your humanity even manages to get a word in edgewise.

Esperanza speaks only Spanish. Esperanza does not have papers. Esperanza’s husband was taken away. Esperanza is heavily pregnant. Nearly every aspect we learn about our protagonist (Brenda Ortiz) is a bar that makes up her cage in the US of 2026. In all that widescreen space, Esperanza is entirely isolated. The first episode begins with the end of her shift followed by the end of her pregnancy. Esperanza’s water breaks late in the evening waiting for a bus that will not come. It introduces us to Esperanza’s first companion. An unhoused man, Nigel (Jataun Gilbert), also disappointed by the bus. The hospital is within walking distance, and yet, under pained feet, begins to look like an impossibility. The narrative dedicates multiple shots to emphasise just how far help is from Esperanza, but even from Nigel. It infuses the grand image of the US with a stark impression of loneliness.

The second vignette, besides Esperanza’s second helping hand, introduces the personification of cultural racism-classism: Nurse Ally (Maria Brodeur), whose apathy is a direct product of her antipathy. Where the first section was about reaching safe haven, this one develops conflict—no ID, no English, a blank intake form, a racist bureaucracy—to showcase the moulding of systemic inequities in the hands of friend and foe. Nurse Ally serves as foil to the janitor, Luis (Ray Huizar), a fellow Latino man. The framing is tighter here in the waiting room and later, the operating room. If freedom and isolation are both wide vistas, both comfort and confinement also reign over the same space, transformed by a trick of the camera, a sleight of any system.

It’s an important point that the film is making: even a bad system can be coaxed into benignity (however temporary) through deliberate action. It’s the ultimate allegory for human society: we can only thrive when together, and it is only through others that we are battered. The final section doubles down on this with the appearance of Dr. Murphy (Jennifer J. Cheung). Ortiz and Brodeur are easily the most compelling of the cast. As a character, the hauntingly melancholy Nigel is the most memorable. When you walk away from the film, Nigel and that lonely flag like a star become merged into a single, inseparable entity.

On the one hand, the idea of collective action born of individual initiative marries these two ideologies, and on the other, offers to each side a path into the other. Punitive systems are made of people, Estrella shows, collectives are made of people, too. The path to decency and a decent life flows through the cumulative sum of actions we each take, together.

Watch Estrella Short Film Trailer