SUSANA
Directors: Amandine Thomas, Gerardo Coello Escalante and
Mexico, 2024, 16 min
Shooting Format:Digital
Festival Year:2025
Category:Narrative Short
Genres:Comedy, Drama
Cast:Bonnie Hellman, Christine Spang, Keenan MacWilliam, Parth Shah, Andrea Raggio, Richard Laite
Crew:Writers: Amandine Thomas and Gerardo Coello Escalante. Editor: Amandine Thomas. Producers: Amandine Thomas, Gerardo Coello Escalante, Mariana Tames, Fernanda Preciado & Hannah Swayze.
Email:thumperfilms@gmail.com
Synopsis
A middle-aged American woman finds herself alone in Mexico City. When she encounters a group of young American tourists, she jumps at the opportunity for a little adventure.
Trailer
About the directors
Amandine Thomas, Gerardo Coello Escalante - Gerardo Coello Escalante and Amandine Thomas are the creative duo THUMPER. Their first short film Viaje de Negocios premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and went on to screen at LALIFF, Sarajevo, Palm Springs and Morelia among others. SUSANA, their second short film premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2025. Their most recent film hello beautiful please follow back premiered online through Vimeo Staff Picks and Short of the week.
Gerardo was previously a 1st AD on productions such as Shiva Baby, Reality and Bardo. He’s a 2018 Sundance Ignite fellow and a 2019 Sundance Feature Film Program fellow. Amandine is also an editor of narrative and commercial projects, and her previous short film Cherry Cola played at various international film festivals and is available through NoBudge.
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Filmmakers' note
In SUSANA, we explore the burgeoning but under-narrativized phenomenon of the American in Mexico. Tourism in Mexico City has exploded. Neighborhoods which used to be middle class are almost entirely filled with foreigners who are escaping their pasteurized, increasingly unaffordable and overwhelmingly competitive lives to seek a better one in Mexico. As a Mexican and French/American respectively, we have come to understand that this phenomenon is a complicated and unavoidable consequence of a globalizing world.
Susan feels left behind by her own country, but has trouble connecting with this new one. She finds herself alone, finally relieved of many of the obligations of motherhood and wifehood, but with no one to go on a trip with her. Mexico is the set of American self actualization, a place to become, although in some ways at the expense of its own people.
For Susan to become Susana, she must be both braver and bolder-- learning to be by herself-- learning also to tread over others.