Young filmmakers celebrate a radical yet joyful approach to life with ‘Hummingbirds’

Silvia Del Carmen Castaños was a student in a Laredo, Texas, high school when the budding cineaste submitted a short piece to a community film festival. “I wasn’t allowed to go because I had bad grades at school,” says Castaños. However, New York-based documentarian Jillian Schlesinger did attend and saw the film. “It got third place, but it got first place in Jillian’s heart,” Castaños adds.

Schlesinger, along with partner Miguel Drake-McLaughlin, had been working with student filmmakers in a local magnet arts program, with hopes of finding young visionaries to support in a collaborative production. She was “totally blown away by the voice and creativity and craft” of Castaños’ work, Schlesinger says, and quickly got in touch with them via Facebook Messenger. “My mom was like, ‘You better not go meet this random lady,’” says Castaños, who went anyway. “I still have my kidneys and, in fact, we made a beautiful film.”

That film is “Hummingbirds,” a lyrical, nonfiction portrait of best friends — Castaños, who was then 18, and Estefanía “Beba” Contreras, then 21 — and their dreams, anxieties and misadventures as captured in 2019, months before the pandemic reordered the world. The artists and activists, Mexican immigrants in a border town on the Rio Grande, tilt at policies targeting not only their families and neighbors but their bodies — amid sequences of chaotic abandon and stargazing reverie. Broadcast on the PBS “POV” showcase and now streaming on the Criterion Channel, “Hummingbirds” won a grand jury prize at the 2023 Berlinale and also was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.

“We always knew we were going to be stars,” jokes Contreras, a gifted musician who directed the film with Castaños. The pair joined Schlesinger and Drake-McLaughlin — who formed a supporting production team of four co-directors with Ana Rodriguez-Falcó and Diane Ng — on a recent Zoom chat. “It didn’t feel like there was a lot of pressure to do something super extraordinary. It felt like we were doing a little school project with Silvia, and at the end, the credits [would be] all of our names, over and over and over and over,” Contreras says.

While the film’s celebration of feminist bonding and subversive antics shares an energy with movies like “Ghost World” and the Czech classic “Daisies,” the filmmakers credit Sean Baker as an inspiration. “‘The Florida Project’ is the rave,” says Castaños. Another more direct influence was the 2016 Polish film “All These Sleepless Nights,” a so-called docufiction about a friendship between two young men on the Warsaw party scene.

“We didn’t watch that many documentaries,” Schlesinger says, “but we did steal a lot of production process stuff.” Besides stocking long-lasting camera batteries, the filmmakers sought ways to enhance the intimacy of each shoot. “Not everyone who was behind the camera was also in front of the camera, but everyone who was in front of the camera was also behind the camera, if that makes sense.”

Much of the film’s easy, spontaneous flow arises naturally from the charismatic personalities of its subjects, already seasoned as storytellers of their own lives from an early age. “Snapchat was the whole thing,” Castaños says. “Social media really ruled the world when we were younger.” The filmmakers’ instincts liberate the project from the canned, reality-television vibe that often compromises coming-of-age documentaries.

“We tried really hard to come up with something like fiction, but at the end of the day … it just started to become really important that we show just our normal, regular lives of being, and being silly, and what we were going through,” Contreras says. “And there was no need for us to add anything extra.”

Although shot nearly six years ago, in what now feels like another era, the political and social issues that underscore the story with such tension are even more present today. The movie is too relevant to be consigned to a time capsule. “You don’t really see it happen, but Beba and I went through a lot,” Castaños says. “We had to board up windows and ICE raids were going on in every neighborhood, and it felt really scary. Having to teach your younger siblings not to trust figures of authority. That’s very intense. Obviously, it’s happening again right now. The issue is it’s always happening, but it gets worse.”

They cite the book “Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times,” by Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery, as a useful touchstone. “I talk a lot about how joy is rarely comfortable — but there is something radical about creating community and being joyful,” Castaños says. “We’re going to fly our kites. We’re going to try and live our lives despite that fear. And I think that is very radical, right?”