Columbia College student Carlos Lerma, 21, has been “living and breathing” short films since he was 15, he said, and quickly realized his love for filmmaking while growing up in Monterrey, Mexico.
Now, Lerma is making his way in the industry and finding success at film festivals locally and nationally, while helping plan the Chicago International Film Festival, which starts Wednesday.
Lerma moved to Chicago in 2022 and is in his third year of studying film and TV at Columbia, he said.
“I knew once I got into college here in the States that it was going to be go go go of trying to make the best possible films, getting to festivals and then hopefully snowballing into a career,” Lerma said.
Lerma writes and directs his films with an autobiographical point of view, he said. Whether they’re about happiness, heartbreak, excitement or sadness, Lerma’s pieces are all personal.
“It’s not that the people in the story have my own characteristics but more that the story as a whole does come from a personal place,” Lerma said.
Since moving to Chicago and making films here, Lerma said his shorts have been in English, which was a “very difficult transition” for him. He adds subtitles to his films, however, to “make the transition as smooth as possible” for his audience back home in Mexico.
In his most recent work, “Don Chingón,” Lerma stepped in front of the camera to play a caricature of himself. The film is about a young man missing all of the aspects of home, most importantly, the food. In the film, whenever Lerma “breaks the third wall and talks to the audience,” he speaks in Spanish.
“It’s me taking you on this little journey, my American and Mexican audiences, and showing what I’ve been up to in my new city,” Lerma said. “I’m also going to show you around my hometown. This is by far the most meta or most autobiographical that I’ve been.”
He said people “have really been loving” the film and learning more about him, such as the fact that he can speak Spanish, which some people didn’t know.
Another short film, “Treasure Haunt,” made a splash on the film festival scene this year and was a turning point in Lerma’s career, he said. After getting the project into some Chicago film festivals, including the Chicago International Film Festival’s CineYouth 2024 program, Lerma said he aimed even higher.
The piece was selected for the Seattle-based National Film Festival for Talented Youth, reportedly the largest youth film festival, and Lerma was able to attend the festival in April. The piece was also selected for the Midwest Film Fest’s Emerging Filmmakers Night in August.
“It’s a pretty incredible, rewarding experience being able to go to festivals for the first time, like treating it as a job more than a hobby,” Lerma said. “It’s kind of like planting the seed and then finally starting to see the flowers bloom.”
“Treasure Haunt” is a remake of one of his older projects from before he started college, Lerma said, about a boy who drinks a potion, turns into a ghost and is able to interact with his loved ones back in his hometown who he has been missing. Lerma said he remade the film over the summer when he was back in Mexico and then reached out to a friend and collaborator in Chicago to create original music for it.
Lerma said he has screened at least one of his shorts at most venues around Chicago, from the Davis Theater to the Gene Siskel Film Center.
Lerma equates his passion for filmmaking to soccer. He said he likes playing soccer more than watching soccer, which is similar to films in the sense that he loves making films but won’t “devour every single Star Wars movie.”
His parents were initially uncertain about his path, he said, but once they saw how determined he has been since a young age, they knew he would be fine.
“They’ve been incredibly supportive of me, of my career, and I plan to pay them back as soon as I get the chance but my parents are really my No. 1 fans,” Lerma said.
He said he found his love for film in a nontraditional way, unlike the “film bros with dad’s VHS collection.” Lerma said he didn’t have a lot of friends as a kid, and would turn to the internet as an escape.
“I started watching strangers online just post their own short films, and it made me feel all the things,” he said. “It made me laugh. It made me cry. And I was like, I want to do this. This is the thing I want to keep doing.”
Making his first short film at 15 was “one of the most gratifying experiences of my life” at that point, he said. The film was about some “bad memories in my life,” he said, which made the process feel therapeutic.
As he progressed, he said, he wanted to learn animation as well. Rather than waiting for film school, he said he “devoured hours and hours of YouTube tutorials” and eventually created his first animated short. The “very scrappy” piece ended up getting selected for a few film festivals in Mexico, he said, and his confidence in his craft continued to grow.
Lerma said he doesn’t have a preferred medium for shooting his films. If he can’t shoot a piece in live action, like if he writes story about a robot, ghost or monster, he will create it using animation. He does, however, “love the feeling of being on a film set and collaborating with a ton of different people,” he said.
In addition to his filmmaking, Lerma started working as a marketing intern at the Chicago International Film Festival in June. He said he has been helping plan the organization’s 2024 film festival.
Vivian Teng is managing director of the Chicago International Film Festival and its parent organization, Cinema/Chicago. She said Lerma “has a great eye for telling stories.”
“Treasure Haunt” was one of the official selections out of some 500 submissions for CineYouth 2024, an annual Chicago festival for short films made by those younger than 22, Teng said.
“He’s an incredibly talented young filmmaker,” Teng said. “We were so proud his work got selected.”
Lerma put out the first short film of his college career in October 2022, about a month after landing in the U.S., and most recently released his 10th film.
Lerma said he did 11 other short films in Mexico before starting college.
Lerma met Louis Mellinand, his “best friend here in college,” when looking for people to help him with his first film in 2022, he said. Lerma had a script planned before he arrived in Chicago and then put out an open call for someone who could help with the filmmaking once he got to Columbia College.
Mellinand, a fellow international student and a “very talented cinematographer” from France, reached out and said he was interested in filming with Lerma. The pair have been working together since and have bonded over the international student experience, Lerma said.
Lerma said he and the team are able to rent out equipment for film sets from Columbia, and Mellinand is more knowledgeable about which cameras and lighting aids to use for each project.
Lerma’s films range from five to 13 minutes. He uploads his work on Youtube and has also recently started putting his work on Waves, an app similar to TikTok but for short films, he said.
In addition to working on his next short film, Lerma’s also writing his next poetry book, another pastime he enjoys. He said some of his short films stem from his poetry.
In the future, Lerma would like to experiment with filming a project solely on an iPhone because he likes to challenge himself, he said. At some point, he said he would also like to create a feature-length film to broaden his horizons even further.
