Primo
Date:
December 28, 2024
Primo
Logline
Old wounds open up, as Carlos returns home for his father’s memorial at the family kiosk. A looming financial crisis pulls him back into a world he tried to escape – as resentment and grief surface, he’s forced to make a choice that’ll define his family’s future.
Synopsis
Carlos (27) reluctantly returns to the family Latino kiosk for his father’s birthday memorial. The kiosk is a place his mother Rosa (50s) treats as sacred and he sees as a reminder of the identity he tried to escape.
As Rosa and the community prepare the celebration, Carlos discovers a foreclosure notice will end the kiosk in a matter of weeks. Desperate, he turns to his gangster cousin Primo (35), who reveals that Carlos’s father once planned to burn the kiosk for insurance.
Carlos insults the idea, but after a painful fight with Rosa, who slaps him for the first time in his life, Carlos finds himself following his fathers footsteps and attempting to burn the place down. Right as Carlos struggles to set the kiosk a blaze, Primo returns and sends Carlos to reconcile with Rosa, handling the fire himself. But as Rosa reminds Carlos of who his father really was, Carlos understands that he must stop Primo from burning the kiosk. He desperately runs back, but instead of ashes, he finds the kiosk intact, glowing with candles for the celebration. Surrounded by the community he tried to distance himself from, Carlos finally breaks down and mourns his father. Primo is a story about resentment, grief, and the love that holds a family together even as everything around them burns.
Author’s Note
I grew up spending my summers working in my family’s Mexican kiosk in Los Angeles, witnessing firsthand the pressures immigrant families face trying to keep business alive. Like Carlos, I saw that world as something I needed to escape and resented the habits I both witnessed and inherited. The tension between my immigrant identity at home and the “successful American” I wanted to become pushed me to build a different life from the one handed to me. But in moments of desperation, I found myself slipping toward the very destiny I had spent my childhood rejecting. It was only when I let go of that resentment and began to understand the complicated blend of love, frustration, and loyalty every child feels toward family and home that I learned to appreciate where I come from.
When I moved to Hamburg two years ago, I immediately connected with the city’s kiosk culture which reminded me of home. Through a 35mm photo documentary project called Keine Kredit, I spent months visiting kiosks across the city and meeting the immigrant families who run them. Their stories mirrored those I grew up around: small businesses functioning as lifelines, cultural hubs, and sometimes the only safe space a family has. I saw the same struggles transcending geography and culture. By telling this story through the lens of the Latino diaspora in Europe, I hope to offer a universal story of grief, identity, and the complicated bonds that hold families together with honesty and depth.
Company Profile
The production company and collective ‘a group therapy’ was funded by us (Laurian-Luis Schymura & Josephine Hasenjäger) after completing our film d’ateur fine arts and media bachelors and commercial master in producing at prestigious german film schools. Our student film involvements were chosen as Finalist at the Student Academy Awards and shown worldwide at Camerimage, BAFTA qualifying festivals, as well as Marseille and Shanghai.
For our bridging of unique voices towards clear target audiences, we are coined by our peers as bladerunners between art and commerce. This bridge leads us to uncompromised loyal partnerships with artists, funders and marketeers alike. A post naive approach – instead of trying to change the old ways, we are shaping our own paths – has proven very successful and is underlined with further education at MIDPOINT Institute, MOIN Gö teborg Delegation, MOP Meetings, EWC and Creative Europe MEDIA.
Our current work is strongly positioned locally at Max Ophüls, Filmfest Hamburg, Berlinale, Cottbus, as well as internationally in New York and Entrevues among others.
Defined by two guiding principles – courage & sustainability: courage to question and reshape established norms, and a holistic sustainability that shapes our relationships, stories, and self-sufficient production methods – our life’s mission is forging and defending space for underrepresented cinematic visions.