Joaquin Cuellar’s Take on his Spanish Film 

The annual Morro Bay High School Film Festival is an event that students look forward to all year and it has finally come around again, this year on May 13, 2024, at the Morro Bay Movie Theatre, students will showcase their films on the big screen. Students of all grades participate in filmmaking, including Joaquin Cuellar, a sophomore at Morro Bay High School, who is going to be submitting his creation to the foreign language category of the film festival. 

Cuellar’s film started as an assignment for Spanish class he created with his classmates and fellow sophomores, Nolan Schofield and Lawrence Lun. Cuellar says the filming process went very well, because the group did most of their filmmaking on our very own Morro Bay High School campus, during their Spanish class.

In the beginning scene of this Spanish film, which is a play on a restaurant advertisement, we see a kid who looks rather sad (played by Nolan Schofield). A man (the restaurant owner) comes up to the sad kid, who explains the reason he is sad: hunger. The eager restaurant owner leads the kid to his restaurant where he feeds him and inevitably, the kid becomes happy again. The restaurant owner talks to the viewers about how great his restaurant is and lists the various items one could buy at said restaurant. 

When asked about how Joaquin came up with the idea of the film, he said he thought it would be fun to “start out like any other film and then go into a subtle fake ad at the end for a comedic effect.” This plot, while unconventional, keeps viewers interested and it is relatively easy to understand even if one doesn't speak Spanish. It is a lighthearted and fun film that Cuellar decided to submit to the film festival for exactly that, fun.