siblings
A surreal yet intimate portrait of two sisters growing up in chaos.
BY CAMILA CORNELSEN
oi meu nome é camila
hola me llamo camila
hi my name is camila
first things first,
let me introduce myself
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Eventually, I realized that as much as I loved being on stage, I needed a career that could both sustain me and help me grow.
Over time, I began directing films, and now my work brings together everything I love—photography, music, and a vision that’s uniquely mine!
This deck is here to show you my first narrative project. I hope it connects with you and that you’ll see why I’m the right fit for this opportunity. (And yes—my birthday is on December 25th… so the timing couldn’t be better.)
Everything looks beautiful from a distance.
This project is profoundly personal. For most of my life, this rose-colored glasses introduction — the one I tell others and even told myself — was the version I could handle. It took many years swallowing tears and avoiding my own memories before I finally found the courage to investigate my pain. Through therapy, I’ve started to understand who I really am, and this short film is the first time I’m able to share something this intimate and honest.
I grew up in Curitiba, in the south of Brazil. I was born in 1982, and my sister arrived just 13 months later — we were practically raised as twins. There was a lot of love in our family, but there were also drugs, verbal abuse, and physical violence. My parents never hurt us directly; the violence was between them. I once pulled my mother back from a window during a crisis of jealousy. I watched my father throw a rock at a wall trying to hit her, and my mother chase him with a knife. They lived in a cycle of fighting and forgetting, night after night. We were well cared for when everyone was sober, but once the sun went down, we lived through nights of slammed doors, shattered plates, and fear. Very early on, my sister and I learned never to tell anyone — who would believe two little girls describing scenes like that?
Anger and love existed in equal measure, and through a child’s eyes, that combination is impossible to decode. My sister and I were inseparable when we were young, but drifted apart as teenagers. Only as adults — she already a mother of two — did we begin putting the pieces of our story together and understanding who we became.
This short film comes from that place. It’s the result of years of silence, years of pretending I didn’t know how to write, years of telling myself I was only good with numbers — a belief that once led me to study Civil Engineering. In my search to understand myself, to grow as a director, and to finally give voice to something I know by heart, this film is my first real step.
LOGLINE
Trapped between their parents’ chaos, two sisters turn to each other and to fantasy to make sense of a night too big for children to hold.
SYNOPSIS
Set in the early 90s Maria Pilar (Mapi), 9, and Maria Gabriela (Gabi), 7, grow up in a house where the parties never end and the adults rarely notice them. One night, while a celebration spirals into chaos, the sisters retreat into their private world of games, music, and imagination — a fragile sanctuary that shields them from the cracks forming around their family.
As their parents’ fight escalates, the girls cling to each other, repeating the same whispered mantra: “It’s just a bad dream, we’ll wake up soon.”
Years later, their adult selves revisit this night over a phone call, piecing together what was remembered, what was forgotten, and what they relied on to survive. Blending memory, childhood fantasy, and emotional truth, SIBLINGS is a tender, surreal portrait of sisterhood in the face of a world too big for children to hold.
LONG SYNOPSIS
Mapi, 9, and Gabi, 7, have learned to coexist quietly in the margins of their parents’ chaotic world — a home filled with loud parties, cigarette smoke, and energy that never fully settles. During one of these nights, while adults drink and argue above them, the sisters play under a glass table, inventing stories with their tiny figurines as if building a shield against the scene unfolding overhead.
Later, tucked into bed with their walkmans and matching headphones, they press play at the same time — their small ritual of protection. Mapi, unable to sleep, counts the glowing stars on their ceiling until her imagination pulls her into a dream: the school theater, a spotlight, an audition she and Gabi have rehearsed endlessly. It is a world where they feel seen, where performance becomes a form of escape.
The next morning, remnants of the party linger in the living room — their mother still awake, the house in disarray. The girls drink chocolate milk, play in the backyard, dance, and climb trees. For a moment, childhood reclaims the day. But a heaviness still hangs around Mapi, who watches her home from the highest branch as if seeing it from a distance for the first time.
That night, the girls hide inside a makeshift tent, clinging to each other and repeating a mantra: “It’s just a bad dream, we’ll soon wake up.” In their minds, the tent pulsates like a heart — the safest space they have.
The next morning, silence settles again. Their father makes oatmeal with a broken finger. Their mother acts as if nothing occurred. The girls get ready for school, their adult selves quietly watching over them — reminders of how memory fractures, reshapes, protects.
At the audition, under the harsh spotlight, Mapi finally breaks. Her rehearsed confidence dissolves into tears as flashes of the previous night overwhelm her. Gabi holds her hand. The casting director gives them a moment. In Mapi’s mind, time suspends and she finds herself in an all-white space where her older self appears to hold her, whispering that she is stronger than she knows.
Grounded by that imagined embrace, the sisters return to the stage. And together, they perform — not perfectly, but bravely. In the back of the empty theater, their adult selves watch them with tenderness.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
I grew up learning that children remember in ways adults don’t. Some things stay painfully sharp; others blur on purpose. For a long time, I didn’t understand why my memories felt so fragmented — why certain nights glowed like a flashlight in a dark room while others felt erased. SIBLINGS is the first time I’ve had the courage to walk back into those rooms and look at them without flinching.
This film comes from the space between what actually happened and what I told myself so I could survive it. I grew up in a home filled with love — real love — but also chaos, addiction, and nights that stretched longer than they should have. My sister and I learned early how to read the temperature of a room, how to invent small rituals to protect ourselves, how to hold each other when the adults around us spun out of control. Those private languages, those tiny acts of imagination, were the only stability we had.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
In SIBLINGS, I’m not interested in recreating the violence of that world. I’m interested in showing what it felt like. The sound of a door slamming too hard. The way silence the next morning could feel heavier than the night before. The way children stay alert even when pretending to play. And also the beauty — because there was beauty. The glow-in-the-dark stars, the tape recorder songs, the performances we created together, the sense that even in the middle of chaos, we were still two girls inventing our own universe.
The film stays with the girls the entire time because that is the truth of childhood: you see adults as fragments, silhouettes, sounds behind walls, emotions more than faces. Their world is the center. The adults in the story are almost ghosts, except for the older selves — the women we eventually become — who appear for a moment in the kind of embrace we wished existed back then.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
The magical ruptures in the film — the ceiling turning into a spotlight, the tent beating like a heart, the white room where time dissolves — aren’t fantasy. They’re emotional shorthand. They’re the way children make sense of things they have no language for yet.
At its core, SIBLINGS is a film about two girls surviving the only way they knew how: through each other. It’s also about the adult who looks back decades later and finally lets herself speak. The adult who realizes the story didn’t disappear — she just learned to hide it, even from herself.
I hope the audience feels the truth of that child’s world — the fear, the closeness, the inventiveness, the small pockets of magic — and understands that healing doesn’t mean rewriting the past. Healing means being able to hold it without breaking.
This film is the first time I let myself hold mine.
themes
Memory & Fragmentation
SIBLINGS explores the way childhood memory fractures, protects, and reshapes itself. The film moves between what truly happened and what the girls were able to remember — or forget — in order to keep going. Selective memory becomes a survival tool.
Sisterhood as Survival
At its heart, the film is about two sisters who build a shared emotional world to endure the chaos around them. Their bond is their language, their refuge, and their strength. Sisterhood becomes the lifeline that allows them to stay intact.
Imagination as Protection
The girls escape into performance, play, and fantasy — not as escapism, but as emotional truth. Their imagination becomes a shield and a way to make sense of the violence they can’t fully understand. Dreamlike ruptures reflect the interior logic of a child.
The Silence After Violence
Rather than showing violence itself, the film observes its aftermath: the air heavy with tension, the morning rituals that pretend nothing happened, the emotional confusion of witnessing what adults refuse to acknowledge. The silence is its own form of trauma.
Children vs. Adult Worlds
The girls navigate a home where adults are loud, unstable, and consumed by their own dramas. By contrast, the children’s world is intimate, precise, and emotionally honest. The divide between these two worlds shapes the film’s point of view and visual language.
Healing Across Time
The appearance of the older selves points to a deeper theme: the idea that healing often happens much later. Revisiting childhood with compassion — and finally naming what was lived — becomes an act of self-rescue. Memory becomes a place of reconciliation.
Growing Up in the Early 90s
Set in a pre-digital era marked by VHS tapes, walkmans, photo albums, and analog textures, the story captures a specific generation’s emotional landscape. Childhood felt physical, handmade, and immediate — an environment that mirrors the girls’ internal worlds.
visual
language
& references
Inspirations
The film draws inspiration from:
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Childhood as Emotional Truth: Aftersun, The Florida Project, and We the Animals all inform the film’s intimate, child-centered gaze — a perspective that captures the tension between what children live and what they’re able to understand. Their mix of realism, vulnerability, and poetic interiority echoes the emotional core of SIBLINGS.
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Girlhood, Movement & Sensitivity: Films like The Fits and Petite Maman inspire the physicality, quiet rituals, and tenderness between the sisters. Their minimalism and emotional precision reflect how children express fear, love, and resilience without needing many words.
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Imagination as Survival: Where the Wild Things Are and, Mary Poppins, and the animated films of my own childhood influence the film’s subtle magical ruptures — moments where emotional reality slips into dream logic, and imagination becomes a protective landscape.
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Families in Chaos (But Still Holding On): Little Miss Sunshine, The Adults, Didi, and Kidding show flawed families with humor, dysfunction, and heart. Their ability to balance emotional honesty with levity mirrors how SIBLINGS finds warmth, humor, and grace within instability.
Camera & Lenses
I would love to shoot this on film. If final budget allows, using Kodak film stock reminiscent of the 90s, embracing the warmth, grain, and analog texture of that era. Otherwise, the idea is to emulate that look.
My camera approach is entirely driven by the girls’ point of view:
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Long lenses dominate the film whenever the girls are near adults.
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They compress space, keeping the children in sharp emotional focus while adults become silhouettes, fragments, or presences at the edges.
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This visual distance mirrors the emotional distance between the girls and their unpredictable environment.
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Wide lenses appear only when the girls are alone in their world — playing, dreaming, performing, or escaping into imagination.
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These wider frames allow air, possibility, and intimacy, as if the world finally expands around them.
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Camera Movement
Movement follows the same emotional logic:
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With long lenses, the camera naturally adopts a restrained, observational movement, tracking the girls as they navigate the adult world.
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These movements feel slightly distant, like memories trying to keep up.
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With wide lenses, when the girls retreat into their own space, the camera becomes freer and more expressive — moving with them, breathing with them, almost dancing with them.
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This freedom signals that we are inside their interior universe, where imagination takes over.
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The duality between stillness and fluidity mirrors the duality between reality and the inner worlds the sisters create to survive.
structure
& tone
A Child’s Point of View as Narrative Structure
SIBLINGS is structured entirely around the emotional logic of childhood. The film moves between present, memory, dream, and imagination without announcing transitions. Instead, scenes shift the way a child experiences the world: fluidly, suddenly, and sometimes without warning.
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Reality and imagination coexist.
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Time collapses: one night folds into a lifetime.
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Adult logic is secondary; emotional truth leads.
Tone: Tender, Tense, and Slightly Surreal
The tone balances three forces:
1. Tenderness — the warmth and intimacy of sisterhood.
2. Tension — the constant unpredictability of the adult world.
3. Surrealism — subtle dreamlike ruptures revealing the girls’ inner emotional states.
The film lives in a delicate space between honesty and softness. It never sensationalizes violence; instead, it focuses on the quiet, uncomfortable truths children notice before they understand them.
Imagination as Escape & Expression
The girls’ inner worlds shape the tone of several sequences:
• The dream audition
• The glowing-star ceiling turning into a spotlight
• The tent pulsing like a heartbeat
• The all-white emotional refuge where older Mapi appears
These moments are not fantasy for spectacle; they are the emotional truths of children who must create internal worlds to survive external chaos.
Humor Within Chaos
Inspired by films like Little Miss Sunshine, the tone also embraces small pockets of humor and innocence — not to trivialize the adult conflict, but to honor the natural way children can still be silly, expressive, and hopeful even in unstable environments.
These moments of lightness protect the audience the same way imagination protects the girls.
Overall Experience
The result is a film that feels handmade, intimate, fragmented, dreamlike, emotionally precise and told with the heart of a child and the reflection of an adult.
SIBLINGS is meant to be felt as much as it is understood — a film that sits quietly with the audience, long after the last frame.
casting
The entire film rests on the two girls who play Mapi and Gabi. Everything — the tone, the emotional truth, the tenderness — comes from them. I’m looking for kids who feel real, girls who carry curiosity, sensitivity, a bit of mischief, and an inner world that already feels alive on their faces.
The relationship between the sisters is more important than any individual talent. Because of that, I plan to cast them as a duo, not separately. Chemistry is everything. I want to see how they look at each other, how they invent games on the spot, how they move around a room together, whether they naturally protect one another or balance each other’s energy. The story only works if their connection feels like something that existed long before the film. The story only works if their connection feels like something that existed long before the film. And if they happen to be real siblings, that’s an incredible bonus — an authenticity that can’t be manufactured.
The audition process will be built around improvisation — small games, music cues, pretend scenarios, and moments where they don’t need to “act,” just react. Children reveal themselves most beautifully when they forget they’re being watched, and that’s the space I want to work inside.
The adult versions of Mapi and Gabi appear in a very delicate moment of the story, almost like emotional apparitions. I imagine women who can hold warmth in their eyes, who move gently, and who feel like the softest, most compassionate versions of who these girls might become. It’s less about physical resemblance and more about emotional continuity — a sense that they carry the same heartbeat.
As for the parents, they are present in the film but never at the center of it. I want actors who can convey volatility or exhaustion without slipping into caricature. Their performances should feel human, flawed, and restrained — just enough for the girls to react to, without drawing attention away from the children’s experience.
Overall, my casting philosophy follows the film’s spirit: authenticity over performance, connection over dialogue, emotional truth over technique. If I find two girls who genuinely inhabit this world together, the film already has its heart.
why this
film matters?
This film matters to me because I grew up as one of these children. The quiet ones. The ones who learned early how to read the weather in a room, how to stay small, how to invent whole worlds inside their heads just to make sense of the one outside. There are so many kids who grow up in homes where love and chaos coexist, where the adults are physically there but emotionally unpredictable, where you never really know which version of the night you’re getting. And those kids rarely get to see their truth on screen.
I’ve seen a lot of stories about domestic conflict, but they’re almost always told from the adult perspective. The parents take up all the air in the room. The children become background noise. But that’s not how childhood feels. Childhood happens in the corners, in the pauses, in the glances no one else notices. I wanted to make a film that stays with the kids the entire time — not as victims, but as creators of their own emotional survival.
This story also matters because it took me decades to understand my own. There are things you can only process once you’re far away from them. Sometimes very far. The older selves in the film aren’t a device; they’re the truth of what it feels like to finally look back and offer tenderness to a version of yourself who never received it. I think a lot of adults carry that same longing — to put a hand on the shoulder of the child they once were and say, “I see you. You weren’t imagining it.”
In the end, SIBLINGS matters because it honors the emotional truth of childhood — not the cute version, not the simplified version, but the real one. Two girls building their own language to survive. Two girls holding each other up. Two girls finding tiny pockets of magic in the middle of things they shouldn’t have had to understand.
I know this story belongs to more people than just me. And if someone watches this film and feels seen — even for a second — then it was worth telling.
team
producer
Thales is my lifelong creative partner, someone with whom I share not only a home but every project I’ve ever cared about. As a producer, he has worked across short films, documentaries, and music videos, always bringing a grounded, intuitive understanding of story and process. He recently completed his debut feature film, and his experience in independent filmmaking gives this project both structure and heart.
producer
Gandja is an award-winning director and one of the most generous mentors I’ve had since moving to the U.S. Her work includes directing episodes of Wednesday, Agatha All Along, WandaVision, Pluribus, and many other high-profile series. She brings deep knowledge of production, a sharp creative eye, and an unwavering support for emerging voices. Having her as a producer on this film is a gift both personally and professionally.
production designer
Taisa is one of the most imaginative production designers I’ve ever worked with. She has an extraordinary ability to build emotional worlds through texture, detail, and atmosphere. While she has designed major advertising campaigns, it’s in independent cinema that her vision truly expands — creating spaces that feel lived-in, intimate, and essential to storytelling. Her work will be key to shaping the analog, late-80s/early-90s universe of SIBLINGS.
cinematographer
Andrea was the cinematographer of an Oscar-nominated short film -- A Lien -- in this year’s awards cycle, and his work reflects a rare blend of precision and sensitivity. We’ve collaborated on several commercial projects, and I’m eager to bring his eye into a narrative space. As an Italian-Brazilian cinematographer, he and I share deep roots and a similar emotional vocabulary, which makes our partnership especially meaningful for a film centered on memory and childhood interiority.
estimated budget breakdown
To be shot in 4 days in Los Angeles, CA, with prep and casting beginning in March 2026.
CAST – $6,000
Child leads + small adult cast, community-based casting, minimal rehearsal structure.
CREW – $15,000
Lean, non-union indie team with essential roles only.
PRODUCTION – $8,000
Transport, Catering, Production Material
CAMERA & LIGHTING – $15,000
LOCATIONS – $6,000
House, small diner alternative, community theater, limited FilmLA permitting.
ART DEPARTMENT – $5,000
Collage book, kids’ room, tent heartbeat effect, period details etc
POST-PRODUCTION – $10,000
Editor, color, light VFX for magical moments.
SOUND POST – $3,000
Sound Design, Mix, Licensing or composing Original Score.
INSURANCE & CONTINGENCY – $2,000
Short-term production insurance + basic contingency.
