NYWIFT Blog

By Katie Chambers

For NYWIFT Member Louis E. Perego Moreno and the team behind TheyDream, the road to the 2026 Sundance Film Festival was 18 years long. The feature documentary is a deeply personal tale from Writer, Director, Producer, DP, Animator, Editor and fellow NYWIFT Member William D. Cabellero. After 20 years of chronicling his Puerto Rican family, Cabellero and his mother face devastating losses. Through tears and laughter, they craft animations that bring their loved ones back to life, discovering that every act of creation is also an act of letting go.

Consulting Producer Moreno has been with the project since it started as a short film nearly two decades ago. And there is extra sweetness to the team’s Sundance success: TheyDream, which debuted in the Next category, won the NEXT Special Jury Award for Creative Expression.

Moreno is the Founder & Executive Producer for the past 14 years of PRIME LATINO MEDIA, the largest network based in NYC that spans the East Coast from Montréal to the Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico) of independent Latino multimedia-makers, actors and musicians in bilingual Latino and mainstream media, digital and entertainment.     

As a social impact producer and educator, he owns Skyline Features, a bilingual (English/Spanish) multimedia and educational production company developing documentaries, television programming and advertising commercials. He is most known for producing 70 documentary shorts, four feature-length documentaries and a six-part series for PBS in NY, on ALL-ARTS/WLIW.

Moreno spoke to us about TheyDream’s journey to Park City and its timely cultural message.  

NYWIFT Member Louis E. Perego Moreno

TheyDream is a profoundly personal family portrait. As a consulting producer, how did you approach supporting a story rooted in such intimacy while helping it reach broader audiences?

This hybrid animation documentary feature is the culmination of an 18-year journey building on the first documentary I served as Producer with William Caballero entitled, AMERICAN DREAMS DEFERRED about his Puerto Rican family that went on to air nationally on PBS and programmed for the series, AmericaReframed. However, initially what struck a chord with me and drew me to William’s first film was that his family reminded me of the Puerto Rican family, Astacio, that took us in and raised me with my Cuban mother the first three years of my life.

The original documentary story follows William’s family as they left gun violence in the Coney Island housing developments of Brooklyn, NY for Fayetteville, NC. The first documentary featured his family back home and the struggles they faced as he navigates graduating successfully with a full scholarship from NYU for a master’s degree as a Bill Gates Millennial Scholar.

Some of the footage in the new documentary feature was incorporated from the original documentary nearly 20 years later in storytelling about key family members who have now passed away as a tribute to them, the imprint they left on both William and his mother, and while immersed in their mourning and grieving bringing them back to life with animation – thus the power of letting go through creativity in making this film.

And reinforcing the fruits of their labor in the arduous journey producing THEY DREAM was the satisfaction the entire production team and William Caballero’s mother, Milly, felt when the Sundance Film Festival honored this documentary feature with the NEXT Special Jury Award for Creative Expression.

However, there is a special chord struck fueling universal feelings and memories of family – those alive and others gone – by all Latinos and non-Latinos to whom this film has resonated with standing ovations as part of a diverse audience at its screenings during the Sundance Film Festival that conjures the great anthropologist, Margaret Meade when she said, “Cultural patterns shape behavior, but underlying human experiences show deep parallels across societies.”

A still from TheyDream by William D. Caballero, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by William D. Caballero.

The film reflects intergenerational caregiving, migration, and Puerto Rican family life — experiences that resonate widely across Latino communities. What stood out to you about how TheyDream captures these themes in a fresh, universal way?

This film of Latino, Caribbean migration had parallels and is very personal. My grandparents came as Cuban refugees in 1968. My grandmother came to the USA at 58 and lived to be 91 and never spoke English. All Latinos who are first or second-generation have a story deeply embedded in their hearts and memories of how their grandparents or parents arrived here, navigating a foreign language and culture – but what they all shared was putting their family ahead of themselves with the only objective driven to benefit their children by taking them to the land of opportunity. But most of all – especially reverberating within us for those that we have lost – sacrifices and love made for us in myriad ways.

In its most rudimentary, the film THEY DREAM seals into perpetuity a living tribute to those who have passed. William Caballero, the storyteller, is a “diarist.” This film is a recording of family and cultural oral histories stemming from a particular geography of origin to a foreign relocation. Because of the beauty of filming, these memories are immortalized forever as anthropological record to be passed on to blood relatives and those that share the same culture – plus to other Latinos and migrants who relate to the similarities. It is the history of migration of so many from Puerto Rico to NYC in the 1950’s and then as transplants to other locales in the USA, like Fayetteville, NC.

Approximately one in four U.S adults serves as a family caregiver for a loved one with a disability, illness or complex medical condition. As one gets older, so do out parents. One way or the other all of us will be a caregiver or is in the midst of carrying out those actions or been there for a loved one who has passed on. That is a shared human experience that most will shed a tear [over] when viewing this film, especially when their loved one has gone, conjuring loving memories.

The pain that William’s mother felt when not present when her mother passed away echoed with me especially since I was not present when my mother passed away, and the pain of being absent at the timely moment when I promised to always be by her side was devastating, even 11 years after the fact. 

Already I have heard from non-Latinos who have screened the film that they shed a tear concerning the caregiving aspect as they are in the midst of doing so themselves for a parent. Again, this film is a lesson in unconditional love, especially caregiving for a spouse or an elderly parent, and equally searing when you get that horrid phone call from a parent that they have fallen and can’t get up – I know that call all too well living in NY when my mother was in Orlando.

Isolina Aponte and William D. Caballero appear in TheyDream by William D. Caballero, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by William D. Caballero.

With your background as a social impact producer and educator, what kinds of conversations or community engagement do you hope TheyDream will inspire, particularly around caregiving, loss, and creative healing?

A prevalent issue that has impacted viewers of this documentary is diabetes, which impacts 12% of the Latino community nationally and 14% in NYC. Then the extra layer that has impacted those screening this film becomes personal when they have loved ones with diabetes undergoing dialysis treatment. Dialysis strikes 100,000 Latinos in the USA directly caused by diabetes. Both these subjects are covered in the film demonstrating the pain, agony and deaths associated with both subjects tied to one another.

This film [as] an impact campaign targeting community would serve well with health organizations, medical facilities, educators and training programs for social service providers targeting a Latino population with experiential lessons in prevention and management for those enduring it and caregivers to Latinos, as well as a cross-cultural population struck by the same variables.

This film is a lesson on reducing and preventing caregiver burn-out. How do we in society support them to better serve a loved one? Also, this film is a window into the lives of regular people for the sake of imparting greater empathy for cultural-competency and sensitivity in general. The documentary screening would serve students in medical school who are often devoid of training in the Biopsychosocial area of these social, public and mental health issues.

This can definitely be screened at the high school and college level, as well as targeting marginalized populations. What will be essential for educational screening purposes is a companion discussion guide created as a curriculum to be used an educator’s manual to optimize discussion and debate for critical thinking skills that produce targeted outcomes for raising social consciousness and inspiring action.

A still from TheyDream by William D. Caballero, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by William D. Caballero.

Through your work with PRIME LATINO MEDIA and Skyline Features, you’ve championed independent Latino voices for years. What does it mean to be part of a project like TheyDream, and how does it reflect the kinds of stories you believe are essential right now?

This film could not come out at a more prescient time, due to the presidential tone set currently targeting Latinos. I have spent 33 years countering negative stereotypes of Latinos and African-Americans in media. Latinos are under siege with 622,000 undocumented people deported in 2025 – often grabbing them off the streets due to the color of their skin or indigenous features – cultural and racial stigmas applied to them as targets. The majority have not committed violent crimes, comprising only 5-8%. And what was illustrated with the photo of five-year-old Liam in Minneapolis, epitomizing how families are being broken up. It is absolutely heart-wrenching.

This film exemplifies the love in Latino families and the universal mourning and grieving when a loved one is lost, no matter in which manner.

When William received his award at the Sundance Film Festival his acceptance speech nailed it when he registered in no uncertain terms his feelings about how “this presidential administration’s attempts to erase notions of diversity are completely shameful. THEY DREAM champions both diversity and public media. It champions the underdog and it champions creative exploration, in a form that this fascist regime will never be able to comprehend.”

And just days apart, the best-selling recording artist in the world, Puerto Rican-born Bad Bunny receiving an award for Best Música Urban Album at the 2026 Grammys used the world stage as a platform for advocacy targeting a captive audience of over 100 million via television, streaming services, and social media reaffirming unequivocally and with utmost moral conviction, “We’re not savages, we’re not animals. We are humans and we are Americans!”

This film also mirrors nationally what happens behind closed doors in Latino homes – it’s just a family like any other family, blemishes and all. At a time when LGBT rights are being eroded nationally on the political landscape, it’s also playing out in Latino and non-Latino homes. It’s especially painful when a revered family member does not accept you 100% for who you are due to your sexual orientation.

And lastly, yet pivotal, this two-decade journey is a tribute to mentoring and community networking that aided William and various production teams over the years to attain this level of success with a project destined to reach even greater heights. There is no question as stated to me by several during this moment of success, William Caballero is a genius. But it has taken a community – a village – to get it to the finish line. This film is a testament and Valentine to community who had faith and made the investment. That’s the secret sauce and formula to this journey for William’s projects and other independent content creators. ¡Si se puede – yes, you can!

Check out all the NYWIFT members at Sundance 2026. 

(Headshot courtesy of Louis E. Perego Moreno)