Fortaleza, an experimental documentary from Portland-based Secret Art Project — with several sequences shot here in Portland — has launched a Seed & Spark campaign to finish post-production and reach its festival premiere.
Directed by Panamanian American filmmaker Stephen Cervantes (NYU Tisch), the film began as an attempt to document his infant daughter’s first trip to Panama, his family’s homeland. It became something harder: a reckoning with his grandfather — a man whose love and control were inseparable — and the house he built to hold his family in place. At its center is one question: How do I pass on the love I inherited, without the fear buried inside it?
“It’s for anyone who has ever loved someone who is nearly impossible to love,” Cervantes says, “and yet, for whom a life apart would be the cruelest thing imaginable.”
Rooted in one Panamanian family but speaking to anyone who’s stood between two cultures, Fortaleza sits alongside intimate, genre-blurring work like The Rider, Stories We Tell, and Aftersun. It’s picture-locked and in sound design at Mexico City’s Splendor Omnia, with sights set on an ambitious festival campaign and diaspora community screenings, including here in PDX.
The Seed & Spark campaign invites supporters at every level to help carry the film across the finish line.
Watch the teaser and join the campaign at fortalezamovie.com — Seed & Spark.
