Why Fernanda Alberdi is one of Mexico’s most exciting new filmmakers

For Fernanda Alberdi, filmmaking isn’t about telling stories.

It’s about uncovering emotional truths that already exist beneath the surface.

The Mexican filmmaker, writer, producer, and founder of Home Lights Films has quietly emerged as one of the most intriguing new voices working between Mexico and the United States, crafting films that explore grief, memory, identity, belonging, and the invisible emotional inheritances passed between generations.

Her work is intimate, sensory, and deeply personal. Yet the questions at the center of her films are universal.

What makes a place feel like home?

How do memories shape who we become?

What do we carry with us when everything else changes?

Those questions sit at the heart of her acclaimed short film Where Roots Are Born, a project that uses something as simple as preparing arroz con leche with a grandmother to explore grief, anxiety, family history, and cultural identity.

But Alberdi’s journey into filmmaking was anything but planned.

“I don’t think I chose filmmaking”

Like many directors, Alberdi didn’t spend childhood dreaming of movie sets.

In fact, she originally expected her future to unfold on stage.

“I studied acting and theater,” she says. “For years, I believed my future existed on a stage.”

Then the pandemic changed everything.

As universities scrambled to adapt in 2020, one of her directing courses shifted from theatrical productions to short films.

The change proved life-altering.

“For the first time, I realized I wasn’t only interested in performing stories—I wanted to build them.”

That realization became the foundation of her career.

“I fell in love with directing because it allowed me to shape entire emotional worlds.”

Looking back now, Alberdi sees the moment almost as destiny.

“I don’t think I chose filmmaking. I think filmmaking found me during a moment when the world had stopped and quietly whispered, ‘This is where you belong.'”

It’s a remarkably poetic description that mirrors the emotional sensibility found throughout her work.

The meaning behind Home Lights Films

The name Home Lights Films originates from an image that has fascinated Alberdi for years.

At dusk, as darkness settles across a city, windows begin to illuminate one by one.

For most people, it’s an ordinary sight.

For Alberdi, it’s a philosophy.

“I’ve always been fascinated by illuminated windows at night.”

“A single light glowing in the distance feels like evidence of an entire universe that exists beyond your reach.”

Behind every lit window, she imagines stories unfolding.

“Someone could be celebrating, grieving, falling in love, remembering, or saying goodbye.”

The metaphor quickly evolved into the mission behind her production company.

“A window is a frame. Cinema is also a frame.”

“Home Lights Films was born from the belief that every person carries an invisible world inside them and that those worlds deserve to be seen.”

It’s a perspective that explains why her films often focus on emotional interiority rather than spectacle.

The drama isn’t in explosions or twists. It’s in what remains unsaid.

“The stories that move me most are often the quiet ones.”

“The lives that seem ordinary from the outside but contain entire galaxies of emotion within them.”

Memory as a living thing

One of the most striking aspects of Alberdi’s work is the way memory functions almost like a character.

Her stories repeatedly return to themes of grief, identity, home, family, and emotional inheritance.

That’s no accident.

“They are the questions that have followed me throughout my life.”

She is particularly fascinated by what remains after circumstances change.

“The memories we carry. The places we leave behind. The people who shape us.”

“I think all of us spend our lives trying to understand where we belong.”

Rather than providing definitive answers, Alberdi sees cinema as a place where uncertainty can exist freely.

“My films are less interested in providing answers than in creating space for those questions to exist.”

“Cinema, for me, is a way of sitting beside uncertainty rather than escaping it.”

That emotional ambiguity has become one of her defining artistic traits.

How Guadalajara shaped her worldview

Although Alberdi now works between Mexico and the United States, her upbringing in Guadalajara remains central to her creative identity.

She credits the city with teaching her where stories truly live.

“Guadalajara taught me that stories live in ordinary places.”

“In kitchens.”

“In family gatherings.”

“In recipes passed down through generations.”

“In the silence between relatives who know each other so well that words become unnecessary.”

Those observations eventually became the foundation for Where Roots Are Born.

Even when her films aren’t explicitly about Mexico, she says the emotional landscape of her homeland continues to shape everything she creates.

“Mexico taught me that memory is not something we visit.”

“It is something we live with.”

Building stories through emotional excavation

Alberdi describes her creative process with a phrase she returns to repeatedly:

“Emotional excavation.”

Unlike many writers who begin with plot, she starts with feeling.

“Most people think stories begin with ideas.”

“Mine begin with feelings.”

“A memory I can’t stop revisiting.”

“A question that refuses to leave me alone.”

“A moment that lingers long after it should have disappeared.”

Before writing a screenplay, she collects fragments.

Conversations.

Dreams.

Photographs.

Music.

Smells.

Only later does she begin assembling them into narrative form.

“The work isn’t inventing something new.”

“It’s uncovering something that was already there waiting to be understood.”

That philosophy may explain why her films often feel deeply personal even when dealing with fictional characters.

“Every film teaches me something about myself that I wasn’t prepared to discover.”

Why Where Roots Are Born resonates

Among Alberdi’s growing body of work, Where Roots Are Born may be her most personal project to date.

The film began with a deceptively simple question.

“What makes a place feel like home?”

“Is it a location?”

“The people we love?”

“The traditions we inherit?”

“Or is home something we carry within us?”

Living between countries and cultures pushed her to explore those questions more deeply.

The result became a meditation on identity, family, memory, and belonging.

The film follows a young woman preparing arroz con leche alongside her grandmother while confronting grief and anxiety.

It’s a simple premise on paper.

Emotionally, it reaches much further.

Why arroz con leche became the perfect symbol

Food occupies an unusually powerful role in the film.

For Alberdi, that wasn’t accidental.

“Food has a unique relationship with memory.”

“A photograph allows us to see the past. Music allows us to hear it. But food allows us to experience it.”

She points to the sensory power of smell and taste as emotional portals.

“A smell can transport us decades backward in an instant.”

Arroz con leche emerged as the perfect vehicle because it represents more than a recipe.

“It exists at the intersection of tradition, family, ritual, and memory.”

“In many ways, it became another character in the film.”

Through that simple dish, generations communicate across time.

Stories become tangible.

Memory becomes physical.

Identity becomes something that can be tasted.

Cinema beyond dialogue

One of Alberdi’s most distinctive choices in Where Roots Are Born is her decision to explore grief and anxiety through sensory storytelling rather than exposition-heavy dialogue.

For her, that approach reflects the reality of emotional experience.

“Some emotions resist language.”

“There are experiences that cannot be fully explained through dialogue because they are felt before they are understood.”

She sees anxiety as something that often begins in the body.

Likewise, memory frequently arrives through sensory triggers rather than conscious thought.

“Memory often arrives through a smell, a sound, or a texture before it becomes a conscious thought.”

As a result, she wanted viewers to experience emotions rather than simply watch them unfold.

“I wanted audiences to experience the emotional world of the film rather than simply observe it.”

Returning home creatively

Production on Where Roots Are Born took place in Mexico City with a predominantly Mexican crew.

For Alberdi, the experience was deeply emotional.

“It felt like a homecoming.”

The project’s themes of identity and belonging gained additional significance because they were being explored alongside collaborators who shared similar cultural references.

“There was a shared cultural understanding among the crew.”

“Certain details didn’t need explanation because many of us had lived them.”

That shared understanding became part of the film’s DNA.

“It created an atmosphere of trust and authenticity that became part of the film itself.”

The search for truth

Casting proved equally meticulous.

Alberdi reviewed more than 300 actresses before finding the right lead performer.

The quality she sought wasn’t fame or technical precision.

It was something far harder to identify.

“Truth.”

“That was always the most important thing.”

She needed an actor capable of communicating emotional complexity through silence.

“The character spends much of the story navigating an internal landscape.”

“I needed someone capable of communicating an entire world through a glance, a pause, or a moment of silence.”

When she finally found that quality, the decision became obvious.

“When I found that authenticity, I knew I had found the right person.”

Influences from Aronofsky to Tarkovsky

Alberdi openly acknowledges the filmmakers who shaped her artistic development.

Among them are Darren Aronofsky, Guillermo del Toro, J.A. Bayona, and Andrei Tarkovsky.

Each contributed something unique.

“Aronofsky taught me that cinema can be deeply psychological and emotionally fearless.”

“Guillermo del Toro taught me that beauty and darkness can coexist in the same frame.”

“Bayona showed me the power of emotional scale.”

“And Tarkovsky taught me patience.”

Perhaps most importantly, she learned that film can function like memory itself.

“It doesn’t always need to explain itself.”

“Sometimes it simply needs to be experienced.”

Beyond stereotypes

As Latin American cinema continues gaining international visibility, Alberdi believes the next step involves complexity.

Too often, she argues, the region is portrayed through simplistic extremes.

“Latin America is often portrayed through extremes—either beauty or tragedy, celebration or struggle.”

Real life exists somewhere between those binaries.

“There are countless stories about tenderness, migration, family, memory, creativity, joy, contradiction, and reinvention that deserve to be explored.”

The future, she believes, lies in nuance.

“Audiences are hungry for more nuanced representations of who we are.”

“Not symbols.”

“Not stereotypes.”

“People.”

What home means now

Perhaps no question captures Alberdi’s work better than the one she saves for last.

What is home?

The answer has changed repeatedly throughout her life.

“For a long time, I thought home was a place.”

“Then I moved, and I realized it wasn’t.”

“I thought it was a city. Then I left cities behind.”

“I thought it was certainty. Then life taught me otherwise.”

Today, home feels less like geography and more like memory.

“I think home is made of the things we carry with us.”

“The stories that shaped us.”

“The people we love.”

“The rituals that remind us where we come from.”

“The memories that continue accompanying us as we move through the world.”

It’s also, perhaps, the reason she keeps making films.

“Every story is, in some way, another attempt to understand what home truly means.”

For audiences discovering Fernanda Alberdi’s work, that’s likely why her films linger long after the credits roll. They aren’t merely stories about specific characters or places. They are invitations to revisit our own memories, our own questions, and our own search for belonging.

As Alberdi puts it:

“If someone leaves one of my films thinking about a person they love, a place they once called home, or a part of themselves they had forgotten, then the story has done its job.”

And that may be the clearest definition of cinema she offers anywhere.

Connect with the auteur

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fer.alberdi
• Home Lights Films Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homelightsfilms
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/es/name/nm17007161/?ref_=tt_ov_1_1