Dreams, a film starring actress Jessica Chastain and American Ballet Theatre’s first ever Mexican Principal Isaac Hernández, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on 15th February 2025.
The film, directed by Michel Franco, features Hernández as young Mexican ballet dancer Fernando. The film’s rough story line is that Fernando risks his life to cross the border to find a socialite and philanthropist in San Francisco.
The philanthropist, Jennifer McCarthy, is played by Chastain. She sponsors ballet dancers in Mexico. She is his secret lover but not too happy with his presence in the United States. She desperately wants to hide the relationship from the public eye because of the general social stigma, the age gap (sounds familiar) .. basically her plan was to keep the romance in Mexico and discreetly enjoy it whenever she visited there and as she pleased.
The Variety magazine published an interview with Hernández, who has acted before but made a film festival debut with Dreams.
In the interview published on 15th February, he said “I felt a huge responsibility to do justice to a story like this.”
“I have been traveling all over the world since 8 years old — I’ve lived in Holland and London and all these places, so I have always been an immigrant. I am an immigrant right now, in a way.”
It must have been a heavy role to play in light of the Trump administration’s immigration policy.