Calabaza tells the story of a teenage boy living with his father. He receives a visit from a girl he has a crush on. However, nothing goes as planned and his pumpkin carving date becomes a moment of reflection.

The short plot is very clichéd for Latinx stories, especially in telenovelas where teenagers are always portrayed as beings misunderstood by their parents who, despite showing attempts to get closer to their children to find out what they are going through, the genuine problem of the adolescent who believes that no one else has lived through what they are experiencing gets in the middle– if you’ve already passed through your teenage years, you’ll know some of this is based on experience.

At the beginning you don’t know where the story will take you because it proposes a toxic family environment that could trigger any action on any of the two main characters. It makes you question the motives of each one and makes you curious about the past events that could’ve led them to have raw feelings triggered by any word and action between them– for a moment you forget that it is a short film and hope it develops further. However, it turns out to have a lighter outcome filled with emotional understanding that leads you to continue to think about what happened before, but I suppose that is something to be ignored only to take into account the context of the problems between the family.

Calabaza is a drama short film that has as its essence the duel between two generations who do not match their ideas: the Latino father who tries to continue living to give the American dream to his first-born and the adolescent embarrassed by his father’s addictions living under the standards of the current world. It’s enjoyable if you’re not expecting a horror themed plot– unless you consider carving pumpkins a spooky matter.

8 OUT OF 10 Pumpkins