KPU student’s short film secures top 40 spot, Best Student Film nom at indie festival

Editor’s note: Diego Minor Martínez, who was interviewed for this article, is the Photo Editor for The Runner. The Runner acknowledges this and has taken steps to prevent conflicts of interest or potential bias from influencing the article.

Kwantlen Polytechnic University creative writing student Diego Minor Martínez had never directed, wrote, and produced a film — duties that can take months to prepare for — in such a short amount of time. But that’s exactly what he accomplished for this year’s Run N Gun (RNG) Film Festival, a competition that celebrates indie filmmaking.

Within a 48-hour time crunch, he and his crew completed their short film Los Que Limpian, or Cleaners, based on prompts provided by RNG Fest, such as using a card as a prop and displaying the number 10 since its the festival’s 10th anniversary, among other requirements.

Los Que Limpian follows two immigrant Mexican cleaners inside a Vancouver apartment’s amenities room as they clean the place the next morning after an event and set it up for a new one.

“One of them is carrying with him very heavy thoughts for the whole day as they’re preparing a funeral service for their clients,” Minor Martínez says.

“It’s about the immigrant experience and it plays on themes of … time and relating to not being close to your loved ones when you want to be, and I think that’s something we all related to when we were making it.”

While the film doesn’t touch on Minor Martínez’s exact experience as an immigrant, it incorporates several thoughts he’s had since moving to Canada.

“You leave a lot of things behind and you don’t realize it until you’re here and it’s been some good time here,” he says.

The film has since made it into the top 40 of submitted entries at RNG Fest and secured a nomination for Best Student Film. The screenings and awards show for the competition will take place at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver on July 5.

The process of creating Los Que Limpian for RNG Fest involved Minor Martínez writing a six-page script until about 3:00 am the night of receiving the prompts. Starting at 8:00 am in the morning, the crew met at the film location, read the script, and shot the short for 12 hours, Minor Martínez says.

After sleeping for about three or four hours, the team edited the film to submit a rough draft to RNG Fest.

“This project was very special to me because I was able to work with not only people I respected and I appreciated a lot, but also our crew was, I want to say, [made up of up to] 95-per-cent Mexican and Latino immigrants,” he says.

“And the ones [who] weren’t Mexican and Latino immigrants were children of immigrants …. My objective was really to represent immigrant problems, immigrant experiences, and make a short in Spanish.”

Making it into the top 40 of short films means a lot to Minor Martínez because it shows immigrants don’t have to “water down” their experiences.

“[It’s] very easy to be like, ‘Oh, let’s just make something funny just so we can win,’” he says.

“But I really pushed against that. I was just like, ‘Let’s do something different. Let’s do something that’s very ours, that’s very immigrant coded,’ — and we did do that …. It really spoke to a lot of people, which I was really surprised about. I was really afraid that it was too specific and people just wouldn’t relate to it, but a lot of people did.”

Minor Martínez competed in RNG Fest for the first time last year, but he only wrote the script for the short film and was not involved in its production since he was back home in Mexico.

He adds working on Los Que Limpian with his crew was the most fun he’s had on a project.

He hopes audiences take away that many people don’t immigrate for fun but to access better opportunities or out of necessity and that moving to another country means giving up a lot, especially when it comes to leaving family behind.

“I hope people watching the film at least come out with something new — a little bit of empathy, a little bit of new knowledge about it,” Minor Martínez says.

“And I hope that little grain of sand helps shift the perspective on some things for some people, especially people [who] are very anti-immigration lately.”

For more information about the competition and tickets to the event, visit www.rngfest.com.