How a No-Hitter Helped a Filmmaker Score With ‘Empty Bases’
23.06.2022 - 18:07
/ variety.com
R.L. Ford Jalmer Caceres needed to come up with a 10-page script exploring the importance of work for his application to Indeed’s Rising Voices program — time was running out.
Then he thought back to a day in the summer of 1990 when the city of Los Angeles was held spellbound by a baseball game that, inning-by-inning, crept toward a no-hitter. The story for his short film “Empty Bases” just poured out of him. The film opens with live-in caretaker Blanca on the phone, remotely sharing the experience of watching the historic game on TV with her children.
Blanca is the full-time live-in caretaker for a woman with dementia; when she’s at work, she connects with her children by talking baseball over the phone. When Blanca is called away to perform a series of tasks for her elderly employer, it’s unclear whether she’ll be able to return to the phone to share the game’s climactic ending with her kids. “The stakes are incredibly high because there’s a sacrifice being made on both ends — not only by the mom but also by the kids,” says Caceres. Caceres was five years old when he moved from El Salvador to Los Angeles, where, like Blanca, his mother took a job as a live-in caretaker for an elderly white woman. He vividly remembers the feelings of longing and loss created by his mother’s absence, which was exacerbated by the family’s frequent moves. “My childhood was very difficult because I felt like I never had any direction,” says Caceres, who attended 10 different schools before entering high school. Unsupervised, he watched television — his electronic caretaker — for hours on end.
“I would sit in front of the TV, and I would just watch everything under the sun,” says Caceres. “For me it was always the movies.
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