THE FILM IN CONTEXT
The Broken Cycle is a hybrid short film—blending narrative and experimental elements—that explores the role of the immigrant within the socioeconomic system they become a part of. It was conceived and produced for the Media for Social Change course at the University of Southern California in the Fall-2024 semester, prior to the U.S. presidential elections and the subsequent change in administration. —What began as a speculative portrayal of a possible social scenario has, unfortunately, come to reflect with greater clarity the current reality faced by many immigrant families.
The film presents a sequence of tableaux vivants that narrate, in a non-verbal way, the journey of anonymous individuals through a labor selection system that depersonalizes and homogenizes. The delivery of a gray overall and a number marks the beginning of the loss of identity and the symbolic transformation into an “immigrant.” From there, each scene seeks to contrast the priorities of the workers with those of a society that rarely fully recognizes them.
In a garden, for example, a woman serves tea to the workers in the rain. What seems like a kind gesture, reveals, in its absurd execution, the disconnect between intention and actual need. The tea cools, it dilutes and the act becomes an eloquent symbol of naive solutions offered from a place of privilege.
At a beach later, the same apparent lack of coherence now functions as a distraction from the core of the tableau: a baby establishes an emotional bond with an immigrant, inviting us to question, from its innocent impartiality, the origin of all racial prejudice.
The following scenes show an office where the presence of the workers is practically ignored, and then a street where an immigrant washes a muscle car —a literal portrait of consumerism and its maintenance. In the latter, a setting full of cars but devoid of people suggests the final stage of this increasingly deteriorated disconnection.
The factory tableau, however, unlike the others, serves as a direct reference to the “melting pot” metaphor and the country’s multicultural foundation. Positioned at the beginning, it aims to set the tone for the cycle of living pictures with a gesture of collective remembrance.
While the film adopts a contemplative approach and presents the immigrant as an essential part of the social fabric, it does so through a stripped-down aesthetic —without dialogue, color, or visual flourishes— and by means of a poetic-allegorical language. Rather than appealing to open conflict, it proposes a silent reflection. Its goal isn’t to take sides, but to welcome a higher perception—one that, especially in the current political context, allows us to observe, with critical sensitivity, a cycle that favors neither side over the other.