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<\/p>\nA summer staple in the Bronx, nutcrackers are colorful home-brewed cocktails sold informally. They\u2019re also, according to Dominican American filmmaker Joel Alfonso Vargas, an underground cultural touchstone, one he became familiar with as a teenager. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe guy who sold weed also sold nutcrackers,\u201d he says via Zoom. \u201cYou hit someone up and they\u2019ll come with a backpack.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of these neighborhood entrepreneurs is the protagonist of Vargas\u2019 debut feature, \u201cMad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo),\u201d which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2025 and is now finally playing in theaters.<\/p>\n
Rico (Juan Collado), 19, earns cash by dragging a cooler around the beach offering nutcrackers. But when his pregnant 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) moves into the apartment he shares with his mother and sister, Rico\u2019s looming responsibility as a soon-to-be-father forces him to seek more formal employment. His personal struggles growing up with an absent dad and being a young man of color who comes from a low-income family soon take a toll on him.<\/p>\n
Though Vargas, 34, didn\u2019t become a precocious parent, \u201cMad Bills to Pay\u201d emerged from memories of men he knew who weren\u2019t that different from his main character.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up around a lot of Rico types,\u201d he says. \u201cThese guys who tend to self-sabotage for whatever reason, which the film is trying to understand. There were a lot of these types of characters within my friend circle, and I was drawn to them, maybe because they had a confidence that I probably lacked.\u201d<\/p>\n
A child of immigrants, Vargas grew up in Marble Hill a neighborhood close to Inwood and Washington Heights, areas collectively known as little Dominican Republic. For our chat, Vargas connected from his mother\u2019s place. She still lives in the same public housing complex where she raised the filmmaker and his siblings as a single mother.<\/p>\n
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\u201cGrowing up in the Bronx, especially in the neighborhood that I grew up in, everyone is telling you, \u2018You have to leave. There\u2019s no opportunity for you here,\u2019 and I feel that it\u2019s kind of tragic and sad that that is the narrative,\u201d Vargas explains. \u201cThe Bronx is a beautiful place, and I want people to see that beauty in the film.\u201d<\/p>\n
Take the now demolished Coliseum Theater on 181st Street, which served as a foundational space for Vargas\u2019 path to cinema. That\u2019s where he watched James Cameron\u2019s \u201cTitanic\u201d and Danny Boyle\u2019s \u201cThe Beach.\u201d Later on, his older brother introduced him to other mature narratives.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a cinephile without us, at the time, even knowing what that term meant. He would bring back really good films. He loved the gangster genre,\u201d Vargas says. \u201cWe were watching a lot of [Martin] Scorsese, and also a lot of Black neorealism. We watched \u2018Menace to Society\u2019 and \u2018Poetic Justice\u2019 and films of this type.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while a high school class on American cinema in the 1970s further opened his eyes, it was only when he attended Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., to study engineering that Vargas started to consider filmmaking as a serious career option. <\/p>\n
Back then, he was considering becoming a cinematographer, but then Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. As people of color in general and Latinos specifically were being dehumanized, he reconsidered how he wished to engage with storytelling. <\/p>\n
\u201cI [thought], \u2018How can I utilize my skills as a filmmaker and all these experiences not so much to advocate, because I never want to give the answers, but I feel I have a duty to represent things accurately,\u2019\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
That feeling was exacerbated by \u201cThe Get Down,\u201d a Netflix show released in 2016 set in the \u201870s South Bronx. <\/p>\n
\u201cI remember watching the first episode of that and being like, \u2018This isn\u2019t how people talk. This isn\u2019t how people move,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cIt just felt so inauthentic to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Vargas, \u201cMad Bills to Pay\u201d came after directing half a dozen short films over a decade, just when he was leaving his 20s behind. In hindsight, he said, the story of Rico, a teenager trying to measure up to the demands of fatherhood while being ill-equipped and lacking maturity to navigate the situation constructively, carried personal undertones.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was trying to reconcile the absence of my own dad with my own 30-year-old self coming of age and thinking about becoming a dad,\u201d Vargas explained. \u201cI was then in a long-term relationship and these conversations were becoming a lot more real in my head.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally, Vargas had cast a non-actor who had recently become a father and whose real life closely resembled the fiction, but he exited the project after realizing it would take him away from his family. Vargas had to pivot just days before shooting began. Collado took on the challenge. Like the filmmaker, Collado also grew up without a father, which made the film personal.<\/p>\n
For the Spanish-language parenthetical in the film\u2019s title, Vargas referenced the lyrics of the bachata song \u201cLoco de Amor\u201d by Dominican musician Luis Vargas (no familial relation). \u201cTu que sabes lo que hago dile que no soy malo,\u201d the Dominican artist croons in the pleadingly romantic track. In the film, Vargas interprets the line \u201cdile que no soy malo\u201d (tell them I\u2019m not a bad guy), as if Rico were writing a letter from the future imploring Destiny to vouch for his tarnished character.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you see it in the title design, it\u2019s always handwritten. In my mind this is a \u2018P.S.\u2019 that Rico writes at the end of a letter in the future, and maybe the person he\u2019s referring to is the child that he had with Destiny,\u201d Vargas explains. \u201cWe don\u2019t know where that letter is being sent from. Maybe he\u2019s in prison, maybe he moved to another state, but that\u2019s the idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bilingual household in \u201cMad Bills to Pay,\u201d where Rico\u2019s mother (Yohanna Florentino) only speaks Spanish, mirrors how Vargas was raised. Though Vargas\u2019 mother was educated in the American school system, she made a point of preserving her family\u2019s mother tongue. \u201cMy grandparents only spoke Spanish, so my mom grew up speaking Spanish and being very comfortable with it,\u201d Vargas says. \u201cAnd then when we were young, and still today, she only speaks to us in Spanish, so that we could have that same comfort with the language.\u201d<\/p>\n
Vargas is also fluent in Spanish because he lived in the Dominican Republic for the first four years of his life. His parents\u2019 dysfunctional relationships made for an unsafe environment at home, so the decision was made to send him to the Caribbean nation to stay with relatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cI learned a lot of Spanish over there and I learned a lot of other things. They told me that when I came back I was a little rascal, because I was swearing,\u201d Vargas recalls laughing. \u201cMy grandma had a lot to do with our upbringing, so I see a lot of her in Yohanna, the mother character. I was trying to make the film as true to my own lived experience as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Vargas, it was crucial that the film felt \u201cdown to earth,\u201d and accessible for all audiences. During production, his mother inquired about the film\u2019s content. Vargas, unable to explain it, showed her a scene where Rico\u2019s household is arguing about a vaccine for the newborn child. \u201cShe was completely taken aback by it. She was like, \u2018Wow, this is how it really is. You really captured the essence,\u2019\u201d he remembered her saying. Now, listening to his mother eloquently describe the film to other people brings him great satisfaction.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast night there was a neighbor who came by the apartment and asked what [\u201cMad Bills to Pay\u201d] is about. I\u2019m terrible at summarizing films, so I was like, \u2018Ma, you do it.\u2019 And she was like, \u2018Se trata de la vida cotidiana\u2019 [It\u2019s about quotidian life].\u201d he recalls. \u201cShe was talking about it the way that I would write about it academically. It\u2019s so cool to see that it\u2019s understood on that level by my mom who\u2019s not a cinephile, and by extension other people like her.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMad Bills to Pay\u201d opens at the Los Feliz Theatre on May 2. Special screenings at Laemmle locations May 4-6, before playing at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and Monica Film Center starting May 8.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A summer staple in the Bronx, nutcrackers are colorful home-brewed cocktails sold informally. They\u2019re also, according to Dominican…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":216012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[128,85215,749,85216,19621,85217,85214,26134,85218,9,24,63,21038,1232,50533,85219,55309,129,131,130,85213],"class_list":["post-216011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-the-bronx","tag-bronx","tag-destiny","tag-film","tag-juan-collado","tag-lot","tag-low-income-family","tag-mad-bill","tag-mother","tag-neighborhood-entrepreneur","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-pay","tag-people","tag-rico","tag-soy-malo","tag-spanish","tag-the-bronx","tag-the-bronx-headlines","tag-the-bronx-news","tag-vargas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216011","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=216011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/216012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}