A film school professor once told William David Caballero that absolutely nobody would ever want to watch a movie about his family. She was dead wrong. Fast forward to the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, and Caballero's feature debut, TheyDream, walked away with the NEXT Special Jury Award for Creative Expression.
But this isn't just another indie success story about an artist making good. It's a raw, painful, and deeply beautiful blueprint for how marginalized families can use creativity to survive grief and claim their own narratives. During his acceptance speech, Caballero didn't offer the usual hollow Hollywood platitudes. He made a fierce statement, noting that if state agencies like ICE ever harmed or killed him, this film would serve as the absolute truth of who he and his family actually were, before partisan news networks could turn them into villains.
That's the real weight behind TheyDream. It treats storytelling not as a luxury or a hobby, but as a literal act of political and emotional survival.
Turning Grief into Art Under a Budget Crunch
The backstory of how TheyDream got made is a lesson in pure artistic resourcefulness. Caballero, a queer Puerto Rican-American filmmaker who grew up in New York City housing projects and later lived in a trailer in his grandmother’s backyard in North Carolina, originally wanted to shoot the entire film using physical sets and 3-D-printed miniatures. He had been perfecting this miniature-based style for over a decade in acclaimed shorts like Victor & Isolina and Chilly and Milly.
When funding finally arrived, it simply wasn't enough to pull off that massive physical vision. Instead of giving up, Caballero pivoted. He leaned into what he calls the natural resourcefulness of growing up low-income and Latino. He hired two talented Puerto Rican animators, Julisse Tinoco and Frank Martinez, to inject entirely new visual styles into the project.
The resulting film is a stunning hybrid. It weaves together:
- 3-D-printed miniatures and physical replicas of the family's North Carolina mobile home.
- Handcrafted figurines and digital rotoscoping.
- Full 3-D motion capture technology.
- Raw, unvarnished archival home movies and modern vérité footage.
By mixing these mediums, Caballero and his mother literally transform themselves into their ancestors. They use tech to bring departed loved ones back to life on screen.
The Invisible Toll of the Caregiver
At the absolute center of TheyDream is Migdalia "Milly" Caballero, the director's mother. For decades, Milly’s entire identity was wrapped up in being a caretaker. She looked after her husband, Guillermo "Chilly" Caballero, through years of grueling kidney dialysis until his death. Then, she immediately stepped into caregiving for her aging parents, Victor and Isolina.
When you spend your life caring for chronic illness, an insidious form of trauma takes root. When those loved ones inevitably pass away, the caregiver is often left with crushing guilt and a shattered sense of self-worth. Milly spiraled into deep grief after her mother passed, blaming herself because she wasn't right by her side in those final moments.
Caballero didn't just make a movie about his mom's pain; he handed her a camera and forced her to become a co-creator. Audiences see Milly’s trembling first attempts at adjusting camera gear. We see her weeping inside complex motion-capture suits.
By learning the mechanics of animation, Milly found a way to externalize her grief. The process completely transformed her. When TheyDream premiered at Sundance, Milly stood in the theater and watched hundreds of strangers give her a standing ovation. She finally saw herself the way her son saw her: not as a failed caretaker, but as an absolute hero.
No Glossing Over the Ugly Truths
A lot of family documentaries fall into the trap of sanitizing the past. TheyDream refuses to do that. It doesn't shy away from the friction, the financial strain of disability, or generational trauma.
One of the most intense segments of the film involves a recorded, animated confrontation between William and his late father, Chilly. The scene tackles his father's past use of homophobic slurs and the agonizing friction surrounding William's bisexuality. It is uncomfortable to watch, but it's entirely necessary. By refusing to paint his family as flawless caricatures, Caballero makes their love feel real, complicated, and earned.
The film also captures smaller, deeply moving family milestones. There is a gorgeous centerpiece sequence dedicated to the memory of a family dog named Gustavo. After both her husband and mother died in short succession, William left Gustavo behind in North Carolina to keep Milly company. The dog brought a much-needed spark of joy back into the home, and his memory becomes the catalyst that helps both mother and son understand the true weight of saying goodbye.
Own Your Narrative Before Someone Else Rewrites It
The ultimate takeaway from TheyDream goes far beyond the film festival circuit. It's a reminder that if you don't document your family's history, their sacrifices, and their struggles, the world will happily erase them or rewrite them through a biased lens.
You don't need a Sundance budget or a Guggenheim fellowship to start doing this in your own life. If you want to preserve your own family's history and process shared hardships, you can start immediately with the tools you already have.
- Record the uncomfortable conversations. Don't just film holidays and birthdays. Audio-record your parents or grandparents talking about their hardest years, their regrets, and how they survived poverty or relocation.
- Repurpose old media. Dig out the degrading VHS tapes, old cassettes, or buried smartphone clips. Digitize them. Store them in multiple cloud drives. They are the raw data of your existence.
- Collaborate across generations. Don't just interview your elders; involve them in a creative project. Let them help choose the photos for a family archive, narrate a digital scrapbook, or write down recipes. The shared act of creation is where the actual healing happens.
TheyDream proves that small, hyper-local stories told with fierce love and zero compromise carry a universal power. Stop waiting for outside validation or the perfect budget to tell your story. Start recording it today.
