Stories of Our Culture: Meet filmmaker Daniel Carrera

Filmmaker Daniel Carrera discusses the highs and lows of his experiences while working on his 2023 “El Paisa” alongside actor David Ty Reza who portrays character Carmelo. Delfino Camacho | Long Beach

On a stage inside a small screening room, six directors held a Q&A. 

All had taken part in the Queer Diaspora, a series of LA-based queer-centric screenings hosted by filmmaker Gregorio Davila. 

Dressed in authentic snakeskin boots, queer Chicano filmmaker Daniel Eduvijes Carrera attended his screening of “El Paisa,” a 2023 upbeat drama short about a young, punk Latino coming to terms with his sexuality. 

The short film screened last year at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase, garnering Carrera an American Pavilion award. 

Carrera has written and directed four individual projects: “Primera Comunión,” “The Fires of Soledad,” and “El Paisa.” His latest short film, “Fiat Lux 5000,” screened at the 2025 Long Beach QFilm Festival. 

Carrera, the youngest of nine, credits his two parents with keeping him linked to his Mexican heritage. He considers himself a storyteller first, saying his artistic contribution is for his family and the world. 

“My passion for creating [is] not financial,” Carrera said. “No one [on these] productions is making any money. It’s about trying to [tell] stories to our communityincreating narratives that empower our communities.” 

Growing up queer in a traditional Mexican-American immigrant family influenced Carrera’s films to explore themes of masculinity and familial responsibility. 

“I knew I wanted to see the world. I knew I was a queer person in a very conservative space,” Carrera said.

Growing up, he felt restless.

Carrera insisted he never felt like the black sheep of his family, but he sometimes felt he was cut from a different cloth. 

David Padilla, a burlesque actor, interior designer, and close friend of Carrera’s, has served as production designer and customer on most of Carrera’s projects.  

“You hear the title, ‘Director,’ but when you watch somebody direct, they have a clear vision. It's exciting to witness that and a little scary too,” Padilla said. 

Carrera remembers the moment that gave him the idea for the sci-fi short “Fiat Lux 5000.”

He was in LA finishing his last project when he got a call.  

It was his sister, who had some bad news. 

Carrera’s dad had dementia. 

His family still lived in Riverside, 60 miles east of Los Angeles. 

“I'm hustling, doing the film thing, and I sometimes feel like I'm removed from the reality of what my siblings are going through,” Carrera said. “For me, telling a story about it was, to a certain extent, a way of contributing to what is happening at home.”

In the film, a piece of sci-fi hardware allows an elderly immigrant father to come back from his dementia-caused mind fog, with unforeseen consequences. 

“I love genre films because they really allow you to kind of push the boundaries on what is, essentially, a semi-autobiographical story,” Carrera said. 

At the Sept. 23 Queer Diaspora screening, Carrera was joined by fellow filmmakers and friends. 

Luis Aldana and Miguel Caballero co-wrote “The Ballad of Tita and the Machines,” another Latino-influenced sci-fi short. They discussed this brand of “brown sci-fi” and the stories it can offer. 

“We haven't really seen ourselves represented in sci-fi,” Aldana said. 

They wanted to recenter the genre with heroes representative of the Latino community. Amongst their ensemble cast, notable occupations were a strawberry picker, seamstress and construction worker. 

“I think there's an audience and an appetite to see sci-fi films from that perspective,” Aldana said.

As the night ended, Carrera and the other filmmakers discussed the difficulty in making independent cinema. Especially indies through a Latino and queer lens in the current social and political environment. 

Carrera's next big hurdle? A full-length feature film. A Latino story, of course. 

“That's just my impulse right now. Those are the stories that inspire me,” Carrera said. “I'm facing that monster, finally—that giant of a feature.”