When “Unidentified Objects”Juan Felipe Zuleta, filmmaker, was isolated with the world around him closed down at the height of the pandemic. He and Leland Frankel, screenwriter turned to storytelling to transform their lives “helplessness”Zuleta and other people live in liminal spaces.
“Locked in apartments, it was a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of… helplessness, and almost a little bit of hatred towards the world for everything that’s going on,” Zuleta told . “And eventually, we started developing the story, out of almost necessity, to tell something that expressed… how we were feeling at that moment.”
“Unidentified Objects,”This week’s Outfest Los Angeles premiere follows Peter. “a flamboyant, misanthropic dwarf hiding from the world,”Peter and Winona, his alien-obsessed neighbour, force Peter to leave his comfort zone for an impromptu trip to rural Canada where she believes that she will meet an alien visitor.
For Zuleta, who is an immigrant from Colombia, both characters — Peter, a homosexual little person, and Winona, a free-spirited women with a wild imagination and history in sex work — live in a liminal space, not belonging here nor there. Similar to Zuleta’s green card, which presents his “alien number,”Peter and Winona have been classified as “aliens”and those who are not citizens of the United States as they cross the border to Canada. “through an illegal threshold that is not meant to be crossed”As well as the borders of space and time.
By incorporating themes of space and alternative dimensions into the film, Zuleta meditates on where people marginalized by mainstream society belong — if they do at all. “We looked at the pictures of NASA were released this week and the vastness of the universe, it’s like we’re literally not even a piece of dust on floating through space,” Zuleta said. “Then that makes everything so insignificant in many ways… we have to give our meaning to our own world.”
Zuleta links these surreal elements through dream sequences — from a mystical scene in which Peter encounters intergalactic police to a daydream of romance that feels so close to reality Peter almost forgets his societal alienation.
For Zuleta, these dream-like moments are justified from a storytelling perspective after witnessing Peter taking medication and the fact that the duo’s journey centers around a group of aliens that “can manipulate your reality and your perception of your reality,” both elements that suspend viewers’ disbelief.
“How can we transition from a world that feels grounded and a journey into all these dreams and all this the perspective that is going behind the characters’ psyches?” Zuleta asks. “I think a lot of the dreams are just ways in which we can access… the way the character is seeing the world.”
The dreams give insight into Peter’s grief-filled psyche — which Zuleta classifies as “asleep”Eventually, he wakes up slowly throughout the film. “He’s almost daydreaming the way we all do that when the way we think about a better future or the way we see the world,” said Zuleta, “through dreams, and to be able to access his his pain… you get to build empathy.”
In a particularly heartfelt scene, Peter goes to a bar and imagines a tender moment of romance with a stranger — before quickly crashing back to reality and experiencing yet another moment of isolation and discrimination. Peter’s pivotal scene in which he hits rock bottom prompts him decide whether to pick himself up or not.
Drawn together solely through their identity as outsiders, Winona’s companionship encourages Peter to face his grief and disdain for the outside world. Despite their differences — Winona, who won’t “stop until she gets what she wants, even if she has to break all the rules,”Peter, who is a college-educated “way more tactical” — the pair learns from each other before their journey comes to an end.
“It was very important to get characters that weren’t necessarily your obvious choice of likable characters,” Zuleta said. “But… even if you didn’t love them at the beginning, you could understand how they felt, and by the end of the movie, you had a much clearer picture of their perspective in the world.”
“Unidentified Objects” premieres at Outfest Los AngelesA screening will be held in person on July 20, and the film can also be streamed online from July 21-23.