Upcoming Film Tells Silenced Story

by Jisu Sheen

Mary When You Follow Her
Manjares
New Haven
Nov. 7

Seventeen-year-old Maria is surrounded by a web of violence, death, sexism, and racism. She has just lost her father, and girls are going missing in her town, leaving behind wakes of devastation. Maria is trying to grow up as fast as she can, but she isn’t given a second to catch her breath. She’s overwhelmed, and she feels alone.

But Maria, the fictional main character in Carmen Maria Machado’s short story Mary When You Follow Her, is not alone. She has readers to witness her efforts to stay sane in an incomprehensible world, and soon she will have viewers to watch the events of her life unfold alongside her.

Hartford-based filmmaker Pedro Bermudez is deep in the process of turning Machado’s story into a short film. He and his team brought a crowd of film supporters across Connecticut to Manjares in Westville to celebrate the movie in progress Friday night, and Bermudez told the story of how the film came together.

His first encounter with Maria was a meeting that happened in the span of one long breath. Machado crafted the story that way, as a single sentence. After reading it, Bermudez contacted Machado directly to ask if he could turn it into a movie. She said yes.

The challenge, then, was how to make a film that also feels like 20 minutes of waiting to exhale. It was important to Bermudez keep the relentless pace of the story as a reflection of how trauma plays out all too often in real life: one thing after another, with no breaks in between. As Bermudez put it, it “just keeps happening.”

Producer Karl Brooks emphasized that this compounding trauma is an experience more common than one might realize, especially for women of color like Maria, who is Dominican. “I feel the U.S. is in a really dark time, and the themes that we are touching upon cannot be ignored and need to be understood as reality,” he said. Through the film, he aims to help audiences “conceptualize the pressures that these people are feeling every single day.”

Maria is now being seen through the careful eye of cinematographer Rashad Frett, who grew up in Hartford and recently won the Directing Award for a U.S. Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Filming for Mary When You Follow Her started a month ago on Oct. 13, with four whirlwind days of shooting. To keep up with the original story’s persistent pace, the screenplay jumps quickly from scene to scene, a style matched in the nature of the shoot days. “I had my phone pressed to my face at all times,” Brooks said. Now there is just one more day of filming left, in January; “We need snow on the ground,” he explained.

The team’s hope is for the film to be a proof of concept for an anthology television series, where each episode encapsulates its own story on a larger theme, like Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone. Bermudez is already working on editing, and the team is fundraising for their last leg of the project.

Part of Friday’s celebration was dedicated to live fundraising pledges, and people’s donations of $2,000, $1,000, $500, and so on were matched by an anonymous donor. This will cover the editing and production process, travel for actors from other cities like New York, and that final snowy day of filming. The team’s goal is to have Mary When You Follow Her ready for viewing by springtime.

“Feliz, feliz en tu día,” the voices of the crowd at Manjares rang out. The event was also a birthday celebration for well-loved New Haven Fair Rent Commission director Wildaliz Bermudez, who happens to be Pedro’s sister. By the time they ended with “y que cumplas muchos más,” her young niece and daughter were pressed to her knees, hugging her tight.