We were standing in the lobby of the King’s Mountain Theater in Kings Mountain, North Carolina, talking when Michael Flores (Date Night; Garrow) walked in. I was with Elements of Madness Senior Interviewer Thomas Manning III, director of the 2024 Real to Reel Film Festival. “Holy cow, did you drive all the way here in the RV?” He had, all the way from New York. Flores’s Sendero, the winner of the fest’s Best Narrative Feature award, centers on himself, his RV, and his dog Rosie, who got more cheers from the festival than anyone else that week. It’s a wonderful independent film that still doesn’t have distribution, and it’s a spectacular example of a director left behind by the system and betting on themselves.
This is the third installment of Blockbuster Bets, our series on the films of 2024 where directors took big bets on themselves outside the studio system. First was Jennifer Esposito’s Fresh Kills (2024), then Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (2024). We’ve talked about voices kept out of the room and the divergence of artists’ desired evolution (their artistic acme) and the public’s viewing desires. Today, we’ll be talking about how debut films infuse cinema with courage, keeping the art form fresh, and how the studio system no longer supports them.
Flores not only co-wrote and directed Sendero, he also stars in it as Sol, a school teacher. Sol used to be married to another teacher, Gina, played by the electric Nicki Valastro (Servants) in a small but standout performance. Their idyllic marriage was cut short when a disgruntled student attacked his school with his father’s weapon. Now Sol is depressed, angry, and taking care of their dog Rosie alone. He has to weather the anger of anti-woke parents who treat his hatred of guns like an absurdity. Then, in a hilarious and heart-wrenching scene, his best friend and principal, played by newcomer Da’quann Leonard, asks him to take over his wife’s classroom. Overwhelmed, he decides to go on the road trip of his wife’s dreams and never come back.
Michael Flores as Sol in SENDERO. Photo courtesy of Sendero Movie.
Sendero is a very successful dramedy and first outing as a director for Flores, who has worked in film as an actor, a grip, and an electrician. It’s funny, moving, and timely. Like The English Teacher (2024 – ) and Abbot Elementary (2021 – ), Sendero finds that absurdity is a better way to tackle the current assault on the teaching profession than dramas like Monster (2023), The Teacher’s Lounge (2023), and About Dry Grasses (2023), all which ask whether teachers have too much power. They do not. We don’t even empower them to survive or have opinions about wanting to survive, let alone influence your child who thinks reading and writing is “too hard” and best left to Chat-GPT. It’s a powerfully ridiculous situation, which is why Abbot Elementary and The English Teacher have managed to be two of the sturdiest TV comedies of the last few years. Sendero treads similar ground, and the mix of humor and horror that one experiences when working through grief is a great lens that Flores points with clarity.
Directorial debuts are important to the cinematic ecosystem because they are the easiest vector for new points of view to take up space. The impulse to leave it all on the field fills new filmmakers with courage that veteran journeymen and auteurs can lack. In the 2024 director’s commentary for Medicine for Melancholy (2008), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) talks about how he placed the film’s most critically divisive scene into the picture because he didn’t believe he’d ever have a chance to say his piece again. So he said it loudly. In the middle of his romantic dramedy about a Black couple wandering a mostly-white San Francisco after a one-night stand, the film slinks into an urban organizing informational meeting at a bookstore. These were real affordable housing advocates that Jenkins knew, and he lent them his lens when no one else would in 2007. Back then, coverage of Medicine for Melancholy often linked the debut of this all-Black mumblecore indie film to the 2008 election of President Obama and whether or not the pundit-class’s “post-racial America” was possible. Today, this sequence hits with the proper weight behind its jab: everything these people warned of came true in San Francisco and the rest of America almost immediately. The Obama-era promises did not. Medicine for Melancholy endures and only grows in power precisely because Jenkins was afraid it was his only shot. And look at what heights his voice has soared to since.
Michael Flores is not trying to be the next Barry Jenkins, but he is working with limited resources just like Jenkins was when he made Medicine for Melancholy for $15,000. Sendero isn’t as limited in scope as Eraserhead (1977) or Clerks (1994), first films that barely exist outside of a single room, but is a perfect example of the kind of stripped-down, “small” filmmaking effort that students are told about in film schools. Large portions of the film take place in an RV or already available rooms. The grandest scenes of the film, the travel sequences, are easily snagged. Public place footage stolen with a RED Komodo, the entry level RED cinema camera, by Flores and his wife while vacation. (“Stolen” being the term used by filmmakers to refer to the process of shooting in when a Certificate of Insurance isn’t active yet.) The dog, Rosie, didn’t need to be trained because they knew their pet’s behavior. The “action” filmmaking revolves around something that raises your heartbeat, and spares the audience trauma without hiding reality. It’s both more powerful and cheaper than showing the real thing traditionally. And funding principal photography with his savings account is the kind of thing that “just shoot it” legends are made of.
The political thesis of the film is sharply drawn and thorny at the same time. Flores does a good job of showing the very obvious and plain morality of the school shooting epidemic while also showing how the trauma it causes hampers those trying to fix it. The trauma desensitizes the public and twists up the insides of the survivors, occasionally causing them to act out in ways that undercut their progress. The nuance built into the screenplay is something ahead of its time on these issues. If you look at the discourse following the recent attacks in New Orleans and Texas, the winds of the zeitgeist are blowing Flores’s way. New Hollywood wasn’t just important because it embraced modern attitudes in their films, but modern shooting techniques as well, and Flores’s use of the “prosumer” or entry-level camera is just that for today.
Sendero still needs distribution. As one viewer of the film said, 30 years ago, this is the type of a picture a major studio would pick up for a song, throw in the money for two days of reshoots to make some shots feel more premium, then promote as a hip programmer for a quick buck and a jumpstart to Flores’s directing career. Today, the film is equipped with a sales agent and crafting a VOD release plan like so many forgotten, and less competent independent films. Michael Flores is a man with an eye aimed at an exciting acme, ready to ride the zeitgeist if someone gives him a chance. Until then, he’s betting on himself, and I’m betting on him, too.
Screened during the 2024 Real to Reel Film Festival.
For more information, head to the official Sendero website.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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