After documenting his painful adolescence, Española man discovers a future in filmmaking

There was a time when Española filmmaker Rafael Hernandez, 21, didn’t have much hope for the future.

Hernandez’s father left home when he was 2 years old, and the painful void of growing up without a father figure had nearly consumed Hernandez by his teen years, setting him on a road to self-destruction.

“All the things that go along with not having a father just sort of grew into this big, festering ball inside (me),” Hernandez says. “I had a lot of trouble with just trusting people.”

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Web extra: Click here to see Hernandez's video on growing up without the active presence of his father

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Hernandez flirted with thoughts of suicide and says he at one point suffered from an addiction to pain medication.

But Hernandez survived, partly because he discovered filmmaking.

Now, with the help of a grant from the New Mexico Film Office, Hernandez is making a 24-minute documentary titled Absent Fathers about the challenges faced by Northern New Mexico youths who grow up without a father figure to look up to.

“I want to base it on a timeline of my own life,” Hernandez says of the documentary. “From the confusion, to the pain, to the time I’m at now in my life where I’m capitalizing on things. I really want to show that people are dealing with this, that you can get help. There’s a lot of resources out there for people.”

The documentary will detail the stories of three young men from the Española area who grew up fatherless and will include Hernandez’s own personal history.

Hernandez is also drawing on the perspective of social workers, interviewing representatives from Hands Across Cultures in Española, the New Mexico Young Fathers Program in Santa Fe, and Youth Development, Inc., in Albuquerque for the project.

Hernandez wrapped up filming earlier this month and hopes to have the documentary in its final form by the end of the year.

For Hernandez, filmmaking has been an integral part of a personal healing process that is ongoing.

“Film has definitely helped me in being able to deal with it,” Hernandez says. “Through film, I’ve really been able to start to express it.”

Learning the art

Before he took Ellen Kaiper’s filmmaking class at Española Valley High School four years ago, Hernandez says he knew next to nothing about video.

He credits Jonathan Lowe, another of his film teachers, with helping him get his feet wet.

“He was a really good mentor for me,” Hernandez says.

Soon, film began to take on a larger role in Hernandez’s life.

“It was actually the only reason I went to school after a while,” he says.

During his junior year, Hernandez and his close friend Isaac Ortiz, who also grew up without his father, teamed up to make a three-minute short film entitled Absent Fathers.

“Whenever (Isaac and I would) get into the more social aspects of being a teen, we’d always talk about not having a father,” Hernandez says.

In the short, which served as the basis for Hernandez’s current project, the two friends filmed each other talking about the outsider status they felt when dealing with men’s issues, including puberty, hunting and sports.

Hernandez and Ortiz made the film mostly for themselves, so they were surprised by the buzz the film generated — first from their fellow classmates and then at several amateur film festivals around the country where they showed the film.

Hernandez recalls one incident in particular at the Do It Your Damn Self Film Festival outside Boston in the fall of 2003. Out of dozens of films shown to a high-school audience made up mostly of African-American students, Absent Fathers drew the most inspired reaction.

“It started this big debate between the guys and the girls there about who was responsible for absent fathers, to the point where some of the adults had to step in and sort of calm people down,” Hernandez says.

That and other experiences convinced Hernandez that the short film held the potential for something bigger.

“That showed me that the issue was bigger than just here in Northern New Mexico,” Hernandez says. “I realized we could really do a larger, focused piece.”

Coping with loss

Hernandez started filming for his expanded documentary in May after receiving a $14,500 grant from the state film office, as part of its New Visions program for aspiring New Mexico filmmakers.

In addition to chronicling the experiences of Hernandez and Ortiz, the documentary also will look at the challenges faced by a third youth, Chris Keith, of Alcalde, whose dad left home when he was 7.

In the process of shooting the more in-depth piece, Hernandez realized that he, Ortiz, and Keith were all dealing with not having a father present in very different ways.

Diego Lopez, a social worker with Hands Across Cultures, whom Hernandez interviewed for the documentary, says that diverse reactions are to be expected.

“Nobody’s got all the answers,” says Lopez, who works with kids in the Española Valley and Pojoaque Valley school districts. “Every kid is different. It’s a matter of how you deal with it. I try to tell (kids), ‘Just try to become inspired in something that’ll get you through.’ ”

Lopez sees the problem of absent fathers in Northern New Mexico as interrelated to other issues, including substance abuse and poverty.

Lopez, who says he is separated from a daughter who lives in Texas, says the blame is often laid solely on the father for leaving, even when the choice to break off a relationship is consensual.

“There’s a tendency to see the father that leaves as a deadbeat dad, but sometimes things just didn’t work out between him and the mom,” Lopez says.

Barry McIntosh of the New Mexico Young Fathers Project, whom Hernandez also interviewed, says these factors are compounded by a view in society that the father is somehow “the disposable parent.”

But McIntosh says, men play an “absolutely essential” role in parenting.

“Men show children how men are in the world,” McIntosh says. “If fathers are absent, they show children that some fathers go away. They’re providing role models, no matter what they do.”

McIntosh says this leaves the potential for sons of absent fathers to repeat the cycle of abandonment.

“You’re going to parent like you were parented, unless you study a different way,” McIntosh says. “You’ve got to unlearn that natural fall-back position.”

Hernandez, for his part, is doing his best to become his own man.

“For me, I have this incredible drive now, that comes from never having a father there,” Hernandez says.

But while both Keith and Ortiz have a desire to rekindle their relationships with their respective fathers, Hernandez says he has no plans to try to meet with his father, who he says he has no memory of.

“We’re all sort of going through it in a totally different way,” Hernandez says.

A retreat down under

There’s another twist to Hernandez’s story, however.

He has succeeded in discovering a life outside Northern New Mexico, complete with a nice, quiet place to edit his documentary footage — albeit in the Southern Hemisphere.

Hernandez will fly out of Albuquerque on Wednesday bound for Sydney, Australia, where he plans to edit his film free from the distractions of everyday life.

The path that is leading Hernandez “down under” is an unusual one. When he’s not filming, Hernandez works at Silver Rain Bird, which retails and wholesales semiprecious gem stones.

At a rock show in Tucson in January of 2005, he met a family from Australia that specializes in opals. They invited him for a visit last December and he accepted.

Now Hernandez is making a second visit to the country. He’s going on a tourist visa but says he may try to apply for a work visa while he’s there. He dreams of the day when he’ll have dual Australian-American citizenship.

For now, Sydney is simply the perfect place to break down hours and hours of video.

“It’s kind of weird for me to be in Española,” Hernandez says. “I’m mean, I still live there, but I got into a lot of trouble there before.”

The shadows of Hernandez’s past still remain, but thanks in part to his trusty video camera, he now has hope for the future.

Contact Jon Sward at 986-3083 or jsward@sfnewmexican.com.

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