Milton Guillén, Andrew Harris Fellow in the CAS School of the Arts Film and Television Studies Program, was selected to receive Harvard University’s prestigious 2023-24 Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship, a $10,000 award that will be used to support work on his feature-length film, My Skin and I. We asked Guillén to tell us more about the film, his fellowships, and why he loves teaching at UVM.

CAS: Tell us about your film.
MG: My Skin and I is the working title for my upcoming film, co-directed with Fiona Guy Hall. Through images of the Nicaraguan authoritarian regime, we address questions of aesthetics, power, and discipline both as constructions and abstractions. The film builds lyrical realms in collaboration with other artists in exile, visualizing ongoing tragedy in a multi-linear timeline that traces what led to the national protests of 2018. At the core, the film explores my personal relationship to political power and exile via fictional embodiments of my family, in particular my relationship with my father, with whom I actively try to heal and reconcile things like alcoholism, abandonment, imagination, and ethics.

CAS: Was there a particular event that inspired you to write the film?
MG: I was born just as the Nicaraguan civil war (1979-1990) ended. That war began because of the injustices of a dictatorship; today, the story repeats itself with a new government affirming itself via dictatorial methods. Some of the same people who fought against the government and foreign forces in the ‘70s and ‘80s now rule the country and are responsible for the murders of hundreds of political protesters in the 2018 uprisings, according to several organizations and human rights watchlists. Since then, they’ve consistently subjected political prisoners to abject conditions and more than 150,000 people have fled the country. This film delves into an unexplored legacy of how the moral binaries of conflict may condition our emotional framework.

My father was one of those men who, motivated by his ideals, decided to fight with the Sandinistas in the popular revolution of the ‘70s and ‘80s in Nicaragua. He later became a prominent percussionist and has always publicly supported the current government, which has been a source of great conflict between us. I wanted to explore my relationship growing up with him and the chasms between us that allow for a prismatic view on why we are where we are today as a country.

CAS: Why did you choose to structure the film the way you have?
MG: My Skin and I is a hybrid documentary: part performance, part historical, and part documentation of the present. While it begins with an eye towards the past, the images progress into a lyrical treatment of the present and then into an imagined (unlikely) future. What forms is an essayistic harmony that defies the boundaries of then and now, real and imagined. My personal story is a starting point from which the film evolves into a co-created exploration of what it means to be forced to leave your country behind.

I am interested in ‘the experience of,’ so I incorporate images and scenes that evoke a sensation, not information. These visuals are sometimes arrived at using more experimental filming techniques while other images are slowed down, pixilated, and pushed to abstraction. What motivates this method is an ethical positioning and artistic responsibility to re-frame images of pain and trauma. This film asks: Who are these images for? My hope is that, when answering, we reach a conclusion that reflects a community experience of healing and an understanding of why some people flee.

CAS: What has been the most challenging aspect of working on the film so far?
MG: Getting funding for alternative, non-commercial projects will always be on top of this list, of course. The market for artistic nonfiction work is highly saturated and, in the US, it mostly works through highly competitive grants such as the FSC-LEF Fellowship. The project, however, has had to deal with other setbacks, including the imprisonment of our protagonist and his later exile to Germany. We’ve had to make time and space for him and his family to settle in as refugees in Germany while they rekindle their artistic and professional lives.

CAS: Who is the target audience for your film?
MG: My Skin and I explores themes of displacement, loss, and the challenges of revisiting past traumas, and sheds light on the complexities of creating art in volatile environments. This subject matter is relevant to different audiences worldwide, including displaced people, climate migrators, political refugees, and more.

CAS: What does it mean to you and your work to receive the FSC-LEF Fellowship?
MG: This grant will financially support the production of our film during this summer in Berlin. We aim to create at least 25 minutes of new material that we’ll be able to workshop alongside the other FSC fellows. Exposing the work to the Cambridge/Boston community is key because of the tradition of experimentation and political urgency. Once we’ve shot the new material and received feedback, we will consolidate ideas and start shaving off many of the themes we're currently juggling. The project should be minimalist, but when I write and talk about it, there is still so much to explore.

CAS: Can you talk a little bit about what brought you to UVM and what it means to be a Harris Fellow?
MG: Leaving Los Angeles to move to Vermont may be one of the most radical things I have done in my life, and I have done quite a few crazy things! However, this fellowship is very special, and I feel extremely lucky to have two years to fully home in on some elements of my academic teaching as well as my filmmaking practice. Since moving to Vermont, I have been able to finish three short films that have shown in festivals across the United States, Latin America, and Europe, and that's something that I didn't have time to do before. In addition to that, the flexibility I get from the university has allowed me to attend dozens of other events around the world as a guest, broadening my reach and network while bringing more awareness to the film department at UVM. I have to say though, that the best of all of this is the classroom, an absolute joy of a space where complicated ideas, readings, and films take on new life every week.

CAS: What classes do you teach at UVM?
MG: I teach classes on exactly what I am working on, which allows me to go deeper into my repertoire and knowledge but also be surprised and learn a lot more each semester. One class is on hybrid filmmaking, where elements of fact and fiction blur into a third space of creativity. Another class is on dreamscapes, where individual film projects reach the edges of lyricism grounded by subjective experiences. Both these classes allow students to fully explore, to figure out what’s possible while letting go of mainstream techniques in which most cinema studies theory is rooted.

My classes are designed as laboratories, and we all have works-in-progress to show throughout the semester. We all show drafts of our work, give feedback to each other, and create a culture of respect and criticism that is unique. I also do things outside of the classroom with my students, like having office hours in town over coffee or going on bike rides. The work gets so personal and idiosyncratic, and we're always exploring the formal limits of how to tell a story. I am often surprised by how much we learn from each other, and I think we get to know each other pretty well, too.