Director’s Statement

At first glance, it might not seem like I have a lot in common with Fernanda and Juan in Bienvenido Juanito. I came to the U.S. via Sweden. But even though their circumstances are different from mine, I can relate to and empathise with the core of their feelings - Juan’s sense of being abandoned by his mother, and Fernanda’s boundless love for her child.

I was 14 years old when I moved away from home. My mother had just been diagnosed with brain cancer, and my father plunged into alcoholism. I first went to live with my mother’s friend and her family, staying on their couch for several months, and then later to a studio apartment on my own, partly supported by social services.

I had always feared losing my mother, and after her brain surgery my mother became a shell, a shadow of her former self. My father wasn’t able to take care of three kids alone and we barely spoke in the coming ten years.

Throughout my teenage years and early twenties, I worked a variety of different jobs to support myself. I’ve done everything from change adult diapers on stroke patients to working for tips as a barely-dressed cocktail waitress in NYC. I know what it’s like to have very little money, to feel alone in the world and to have no parents to fall back on.

For several years I moved through the world, constantly pushing forward. But everything changed when I became a mother myself. I wasn’t prepared for the primal rush that washed over me after giving birth. When I received my daughter, it was like a feral animal awoke within me and I knew in that moment that I would do anything, absolutely anything to protect her. Becoming a mother also connected me with the child I used to be, and the longing I still felt for my mother and father.

A few days after giving birth, I was standing in a changing room and trying on a nursing bra when I heard an infant baby crying in the store. I knew that my daughter was sleeping peacefully at home, but suddenly milk sprayed from my breasts. My body didn’t care who the crying baby was! I was a mother now, I had milk and my body wanted to comfort the child. This was the first time that happened, but I quickly learned that as mothers, we are connected to all children, not just our own, and we share a need to keep them safe.

Months later, I read that the U.S. government was separating children from their parents under the Zero Tolerance Family Separation Policy and placing them in detention centers, some as young as nursing infants. As a mother, there is nothing more terrifying than the thought of someone taking one’s child away. And for a child, being separated from one’s mother and father.

Los Angeles was largely shut down when I moved here in August 2020, and the only in-person interactions I had was with other mothers and nannies in playgrounds around the city. Connecting with and listening to women in LA inspired Writer David Orantes and me, together with our team of close collaborators, to approach this relevant and topical story about the aftermath and devastating consequences that child separations have on families.

My mother passed away a few years ago, but I still have a fraught relationship with my father. Even though it wasn’t entirely his fault, I still can’t move past my feelings of being abandoned. And I understand how for someone like Juan, those scars, can run deep.

-Anna Lo Westlin, Los Angeles 2022