Nico Casavecchia is an Emmy-nominated director, screenwriter and illustrator based in Los Angeles whose work has been featured by the BBC, New York Times, IndieWire and more. His feature debut, Finding Sofía, premiered at the Austin Film Festival, and “BattleScar,” his virtual reality film starring Rosario Dawson, premiered at Sundance in 2018. His new short film “Border Hopper” was selected by Sundance for this year’s U.S Competition and is now playing at the Indy Shorts film festival. Below, he details the making of “Border Hopper.”—M.M.
When I was 19, I migrated to Europe. Three months in, my tourist visa expired, transforming me into an illegal immigrant — a novel identity for a middle-class kid from Argentina. In a mix of privilege and delusion, I wore the label like a badge of honor, only to discover that getting paid under the table working as a waiter was extremely hard, especially for someone completely unfit for the realities of a real job.
My solution was to use my incipient knowledge of filmmaking. Instead of waiting tables or selling toys door to door — jobs I tried and failed at — the music video world welcomed my lack of experience and general clumsiness as features, not bugs. Plus, getting paid in cash was the norm. I managed to survive, but it took me many years to fix my status and become “legal.”
After a decade in Barcelona as a filmmaker, I decided to run for the Olympics of immigration: the United States’ elusive O1 Artist Visa, officially “Alien of Outstanding Abilities” — arguably the most beautifully named visa in the immigration lexicon.
As a professional filmmaker with awards and European bureaucracy endurance, I thought I was ready. Boy, was I wrong. Nothing prepared me for the U.S. approach to migration. If Europe was about ancestry, America was about spectacle. Money and clout were the keys to success.
America didn’t want my quirky side — my short films with puppets augmented in After Effects. America wanted the side of me that looked like America. My lawyer said, “You have to show bureaucrats success they can understand.” Luckily, I had made a McDonald’s commercial about southern biscuits and some Sprite branded content.
I got to work, filing binders with proof of awards, begging for cringey letters praising my achievements, and making self-aggrandizing statements about the glorious future ahead. It felt more like a reality show than a government process. To American citizens, the government feels like a DMV line; to me, it feels like Shark Tank meets summary execution.
I learned that getting an artist visa meant pitching myself to America, not just collecting documents. American bureaucracy is a sacrificial rite of passage that destroys your identity and primes you for the unbridled ambition of the American Dream. And once you’ve sunk all your savings into lawyers, you’re trapped in a sunk-cost fallacy, like a fly in honey. The only way out is by succeeding financially, or else.
Why do we still do it? I ask myself that every day. I wasn’t born in a war-torn country, and I have the resources to build a life in many nice places. I know why I decided to play this video game: because of Spielberg, Cuaron, P.T. Anderson, Cassavetes. I had the delusional, self-destructive impulse to put my fingerprint on the clay of American Cinema, the most beautiful narcotic.
Nico Casavecchia on Immigration Obstacles
After renewing my O1 Visa for years, contributing to my attorney’s dream of owning a boat, I decided to move on to the next level of the video game: the Green Card. To embark on this journey was to accept that the odds were stacked against me; the refusal rate for green card applicants is a staggering 96%. This turns the green card into the cryptid of visas, a mythical creature whose existence is rumored but unverified by science.
I embarked, once again, on the process of spending insane amounts of money and mental health. I recruited friends to write letters, took blood samples, and got my mouth swabbed by doctors to collect my DNA for the immigration archives. All this while enduring Trump’s government, which, in the face of their inability to pass legislation, decided to sabotage the system, stalling applications and conveniently “losing” pages of the presented cases.
In the midst of all that, I got a job to shoot a commercial abroad. A much-needed injection of funds after Covid. The problem was immigration limbo: My case was approved, but the required travel permits were not yet issued. If I traveled, I was risking my whole application process and, most importantly, the only hope my wife, Mercedes Arturo, had of working in the U.S.
The events of that week moved like the best of thrillers: high stakes, twist turns, cliffhangers. We started taking notes when we realized it felt just like a film. So we wrote it together months later, and “Border Hopper” was born.
Raising the Stakes of ‘Border Hopper’
We had a first draft that was a dramatization of the events, just as they happened. But it lacked the emotional engagement of the experience. I was taking a shower (the place where all my ideas start), and it dawned on me that the metaphor of immigration as a video game could work so well here. That immediately took us to Candy Crush — addictive, alluring, and increasingly difficult, just like the American dream Laura chases in the film.
Mixing animation, live action and VFX is at the core of everything I do. Using mixed media to tell stories is the way I always express myself and in this story was simply the perfect way to execute the allegorical scenes inside the video-game.
For our lead character Laura, a filmmaker who faces a travel challenge not unlike my own, we enlisted our dear friend Gabriela Ortega. The short marks her return to acting after a successful run as a director, including a short at Sundance and a project for Disney. Gabriela infused the character with her own understanding of being a Latina immigrant, bringing her to life. Santiago Reyes, who plays her husband, is now a friend I met through DCLA, a director’s workshop I run with a group of friends here in Los Angeles. We cast Santi for one of our workshops, and I was blown away by the nuance he brings to characters.
I fundraised for the film all throughout 2022 without any luck. As it turns out, short films are not profitable. The next year we decided to use our savings and prove to everyone we were committed to the project. When the project was already a reality, support poured in. The head of each department volunteered their time and equipment, and my dear friend Martín Allais and his company, Brut, financed and produced the animation segments.
In the end, the film was made possible by the community getting together to tell a story, which is the most inspiring thing in filmmaking.
You can learn more about Indy Shorts here.
Main image: “Border Hopper.”