“I’m striving in my work to embrace and uplift the beauty of all humanity. It’s what I try to explore. That’s what inspires me,” said screenwriter and filmmaker Barbara Cigarroa whose screenplay El Otro Lado will be developed as an independent feature film.
El Otro Lado is set on the landscape of two cities facing each other across the international border of the Río Grande. The story rests on Lucy, a 17-year-old Mexican-American girl and her father, Rey, and the two unaccompanied Guatemalan minors, Tomás, 17, and his brother Lalo, 5, that Rey has sponsored not out of kindness, but for cash. While the story reveals that the presence of the brothers has affected the familial dynamics of Lucy and Rey, it also tells of the peril Tomás feels for his own survival and that of his brother.
The story offers a peer into the inhumane abyss of U.S. immigration policy.
According to Cigarroa, Laredo-Nuevo Laredo and Brownsville-Matamoros are being considered as settings for El Otro Lado. “The film will probably go into production in the next year or year-and-a-half,” she said.
When writing or creating for film, she said she immerses herself in the world from which she is capturing sound, color, and the essence of the people who live there. “You can listen to what the world is bringing to the story. I try as close as I can to bring authenticity to the story I want to tell,” she continued, adding, “In El Otro Lado I want to show the vitality of the border and the fluidity of its culture.”
She recalled the walks from the home of her maternal grandparents in Nuevo Laredo to Laredo. “The ease of it, the walk across the international bridge, it was seamless, impactful about the way I felt about both cities as one,” she said.
“I grew up in a large family. I had about 50 first cousins. Our playground was the streets of Nuevo Laredo and Laredo and my grandfather’s ranch in Mexico. Two of the driving forces in my life were my Mamagrande Barbara and my grandfather Joaquin Cigarroa, a physician who late in his life still made house calls to downtown Laredo and Nuevo Laredo,” Cigarroa recalled.
Cigarroa holds an MFA in screenwriting from Columbia University and a BA in English from Yale. She works as a writer and consultant for various narrative, documentary, and TV projects, current and past work including with Red Crown, K. Period, Paramount Plus, and ITVS. She is also a Professor in Screenwriting at NYU Tisch School of the Arts in the Grad Film Department. She served as the Head of Writing in 2025, and as a full time Visiting Professor between 2023 - 2025.
While at Yale she had the good fortune to intern with documentarian Albert Maysles (Salesman, Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter).
Her original iteration of El Otro Lado was selected for the 2019 Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Lab. It was also chosen to be a part of The BlackList’s inaugural Latinx List.
Her short film Dios Nunca Muere had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival; and in 2019, Cigarroa was celebrated by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the “Top 25 New Faces of Independent Film.”
