The Bronx comes to life in “Mad Bills to Pay,” a coming-into-adulthood drama about two teenagers trying to navigate a surprise pregnancy.<\/p>\n
A smash hit at festivals, the film comes from the heart of Joel Alfonso Vargas, a Bronx-born screenwriter and director with a clear adoration of his home borough.<\/p>\n
“I think it’s clear maybe in the film how much\u2026 how much I missed the Bronx,” Vargas said ahead of the premiere. “I think is part of the reason why it is it looks and feels the way it does.”<\/p>\n
Vargas, who grew up in the projects, experienced the all-too familiar desire to leave home and explore what the world had to offer.<\/p>\n
The largely self-taught filmmaker studied at schools in California and London before returning to New York to make his first feature film, leading a cast of relative newcomers in a shoot that lasted only 16 days.<\/p>\n
“The narrative growing up was always, ‘you want to get out of the projects,'” he said.<\/p>\n
“It took a while to kind of get me there,” he added. “When I sat down to think about it, the struggle that I guess we grew up around, and in, it was just beautiful and I kind of wanted to show that beauty.”<\/p>\n
The film is a standout, not only for its rich storytelling and deployment of improvisation, but its still, fly-on-the-wall style cinematography. Vargas said his background in documentary filmmaking informed his observational choice with the camera.<\/p>\n
“Mad Bills to Pay” centers on a Dominican American family: a mom working all hours as a nurse, a younger sister trying to break out, and Rico, a 19-year-old hustler who spends his summer days selling nutcrackers on the beach. The realities of adulthood come knocking when Rico invites his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend to move in with his family. It’s a recipe for chaos.<\/p>\n
Vargas infuses the film with the characters of his adolescence, aided by the breakout performances of Juan Collado (Rico) and Destiny Checho (who plays Destiny).<\/p>\n
“One of my brother’s friends was sort of a Rico character, you know, self-sabotage and kind of a tornado guy,” he said. <\/p>\n
Vargos knows what it’s like to hustle. The film “was made for peanuts,” and funded through a personal loan aided by the support of a few grants. <\/p>\n
His advice for other future first-time filmmakers?<\/p>\n
“Don’t wait for a yes would be my my advice,” he said. ‘If you really believe in what you’re doing, in yourself, and you know, the team around you because it is a collaborative artform with people, find a way to do it.”<\/p>\n
“Mad Bills to Pay” is now playing at the Regal Concourse in the Bronx and Film Forum in Manhattan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Bronx comes to life in “Mad Bills to Pay,” a coming-into-adulthood drama about two teenagers trying to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,9,24,63,129,131,130],"class_list":["post-200844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}