I Don’t Dream in Spanish Anymore is a horror fiction film project about an intergenerational curse and one woman’s quest to break that curse before it kills her in childbirth and continues the cycle. The story begins in the mountains of rural Puerto Rico in the 1960s with Amalia, a young midwife who incurs the wrath of a powerful bruja (witch) when the bruja’s daughter dies in childbirth. It jumps to modern-day Chicago, where Amalia’s granddaughter, Isabel, is a university professor whose research uses game design and virtual reality to track and study how trauma is passed down over generations. Isabel is pregnant and in her third trimester when she begins having visceral nightmares, which she attributes to PTSD from her previous miscarriage and the fact that her own mother died in childbirth. After she’s visited by the spirit of the bruja’s daughter, her nightmares intensify, she sleepwalks, and starts fires in her sleep before realizing her dreams aren’t dreams at all, but inherited memories.

I Don’t Dream in Spanish Anymore is about healing from trauma -- personal, generational, and historical. It is about the quest to break a family curse that is both metaphorical and literal. This project explores spiritual and scientific discoveries that reflect how a healing journey is the work of generations.