I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week. Credit: Courtesy Photo / Luis Fernando Puente

Filmmaker Luis Fernando Puente was only 9 years old when his family moved to Texas from Mexico in 2002. His father had obtained a work visa and the rest of the family was approved to receive green cards. As a kid, Puente remembers the process being painless.

Fast-forward to 2021. Puente went through the same process again for his wife, who was also born in Mexico. This time, walking into an immigration services office felt different. Cold, indifferent, even frightening.

“We couldn’t afford a lawyer, so we were doing it all on our own,” Puente, 30, told the Current during a recent interview. “You start looking at one form and all the other adjacent forms that are needed and it becomes this big thing. It was a very stressful process.”

Puente chose to dramatize the true-life experience in his short film I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry. The short follows Maria Luisa (Alejandra Herrera) during her stressful interaction with an immigration officer (Cherie Julander) alongside her husband Jorge (Enoc Oteo) as she interviews for a green card.

I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this week. Puente’s short was one of 64 selected for this year’s festival out of 10,981 submissions — the most in Sundance history.

Puente lives in Provo, Utah, where he graduated from Brigham Young University with a degree in media arts. The 2011 graduate of Ronald Reagan High School hopes to one day return to San Antonio and make more movies.

How did you find out your film got accepted into Sundance?

It was a phone call at 9:30 on a Sunday night. I was coming back with a friend from a writer’s retreat. I was putting gas [in my vehicle] and got a call from a random number. So, I answered it and they said, “Hi, I’m so and so from the Sundance Institute.” My friend immediately pulled his phone out and started recording. I was speechless. The first question you have in your mind is like, “Is this for real?” And then you pinch yourself to make sure that it’s not a dream.

What’s your earliest movie memory?

I remember my dad taking us to buy The Empire Strikes Back on VHS [circa the mid-90s]. I must have been around 3 years old. This was back in Mexico. We didn’t have a TV, so we went to my grandparents’ house to watch it. I was just so impressed. I also grew up watching a lot of Steven Spielberg films. I was watching them at a very early age. So, that’s the kind of language I was exposed to early on.

Was the immigration officer as cold in real life as the one in your film?

Yeah, for us that happened the moment we challenged him when something he said didn’t sound correct. It was like, “Oh, you’re challenging me? I’m the authority here.” So, it was like he was in business mode and very cold. I didn’t want to vilify the person too much, but it’s something I wanted to capture. There is a power dynamic to it. Even if you know you’re right, you think, “Is fighting back going to hurt me in the long run?” I mean, this person has the power to issue a deportation right there.

Who inspires your filmmaking today?

Well, it wasn’t until late in high school and in college that I started to develop a bigger palate [for] filmmaking and started being influenced by other directors. I can’t really pinpoint one specific director, but I can point to classic ones like [Andrei] Tarkovsky and [Martin] Scorsese and [Francis Ford] Coppola. I’m at an early point in my career where I’m still developing my own voice, my own style, my own everything. So, I feel like I’m just grabbing from everywhere and then seeing what sticks.

Do you have any plans to move back to San Antonio?

I want to go back to live there. For me, Utah has always felt like a pass by. A lot of my network is up here, but it’s not somewhere where I really want to grow roots. The stories and the themes that I want to tackle are all centered around Northern Mexico and Southern Texas. So, moving back is in the plans. Hopefully, my career can take me back there.

What do you hope people who see your short film take from it?

Empathy. People don’t realize what immigration entails. They don’t really know what that world looks like. The immigration system in the U.S. was developed in the late ’60s, and it hasn’t really changed much. That’s an issue because the world has changed so much. I hope they see that there is a human element to immigration. If nothing else, I hope people start asking questions and start a conversation about this broken system.

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This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 7, 2023.