About This Project

Laura Gauch

The Ocean Is Closed on Mondays is a short film exploring what is lost through assimilation while reflecting on the challenges that come with immigrating to a new country. Specifically focusing on the Latinx Community in NYC, the script follows a narrative developed by researching and gathering personal experiences from a broad spectrum of individuals prompted with questions such as ‘What are situations and places in your life where you completely feel like you belong?’. The feelings and insights extracted from the research were then elaborated and processed into a poem written in collaboration with Elisabet Velasquez. Scanning the rhythm of the film, the poem touches upon the loss of heritage, identity, and situations that test one’s feeling of belonging and it invites the viewer to take part in the introspective process, urging the audience to interrogate their own existence within a community, city, and country that’s often not their birthplace.

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