U.S. Short Film, 19 minutes, Texas Premiere

Synopsis:

Two cousins scraping by as loggers in the post wildfire Santa Cruz Mountains discover something deep in the redwood forest that can bring them together or tear them apart.

Jesus Beltran

Bio:

Jesus Beltran is a self-taught writer-director whose work blends grounded realism, emotionally resonant performances, and original music to tell stories marked by honesty and cultural specificity. Raised by immigrant parents in Fort Worth, TX and trained as an engineer at Stanford, Beltran found his way to filmmaking outside traditional paths—learning by doing, driven by a belief that powerful stories often emerge from overlooked corners of American life.

His short films, including The Grass Grows Green and Motos, have screened at Sundance, SXSW, Cinequest, Indy Shorts, and other top festivals, earning acclaim for their nuanced portraits of immigrant characters navigating complex moral terrain. His feature script Americano was selected for the Sundance Producing Labs, further establishing him as a screenwriter crafting multicultural stories that reject both sentimentality and cliché. His films explore the quiet, often conflicted dignity of people living on the margins—while connecting broadly through emotional clarity, dark humor, and human-scale stakes.

Beltran is currently developing his first feature, There’s No Place, a road film about two estranged Mexican-American brothers in Silicon Valley that deepens his exploration of family, class, and survival in a country that rarely sees them clearly.