The word “debut” can make a first feature sound like a sudden arrival. The production trail behind Joaquín Ruano’s Nosotros tells a longer story. Programa Ibermedia records support for the Guatemala–Mexico project in its 2019 co-development call and its 2021 co-production call. This fall, the finished film entered Toronto’s Discovery program and reached U.S. audiences through AFI’s Latin American Film Festival. Several years separate the funding milestones from those introductions.
The film also passed through Impulso Morelia in 2025, according to the Morelia festival’s July announcement of its Toronto selection. Taken together, these institutional records show stages of a first feature’s passage toward an audience. They make it possible to name the support behind the arrival, rather than describing an emerging filmmaker as if a festival had discovered a completed work without a history.
At the center is Romero, who leaves his wife and child in the Guatemalan highlands and finds work as a security guard in Guatemala City. The AFI synopsis places his job in a shopping mall, where he meets Nubia, a trans woman who operates a shop. Their relationship develops within a setting already organized around work, accommodation and expectations of masculine behavior. Józef Coxaj and Lola Vásquez play Romero and Nubia; Mayra Salvador is also in the principal cast.
That premise gives the city more than one function. It is a destination for employment and a place where an intimate life becomes possible, while the surrounding social pressures remain. Those are the stakes described by the festival materials. They allow a discussion of what Ruano has chosen to dramatize without claiming that a synopsis can establish how the performances or filmmaking resolve those tensions.
Ibermedia identifies Ruano as Guatemalan-Mexican and credits the production to Guatemala’s Cine Concepción and Mexico’s Cine Murciélago. Ruano wrote the screenplay; Pamela Guinea shares the producing credit in the festival listings. Paolo Girón is the cinematographer and César Díaz the editor. Naming that team makes the cross-border collaboration visible while keeping the story’s Guatemalan location specific.
Its fall itinerary included an October 2 screening at the Calgary International Film Festival, whose 2026 edition ran September 24 through October 4 and listed the film in International Narrative Competition. AFI identifies its own presentation as a U.S. premiere, with an opening date of September 27. Those are festival engagements, not evidence of a general commercial release. For audiences following new Central American cinema, Nosotros offers both a title to watch for and a documented example of the development work that precedes a first feature’s public life.