VALENTINA

Mill Valley Film Festival 2025 Official Selection. Mind the Gap Creation Prize Award Winner, Viva El Cine Audience Favorite

Austin Film Festival 2025 Official Selection

Valentina is a hybrid comedy-documentary film, starring Keyla Monterroso Mejia (Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Studio, Abbott Elementary) and executive produced by Jessica Alba’s Lady Metalmark. Valentina is franknew’s first feature film, born out of years of our research and reporting on immigration.

“In this singular debut, the winner of MVFF's Mind the Gap Creation Prize, director Tatti Ribeiro leverages the best of hybrid filmmaking to create a comedy-meets-documentary that feels both urgent and slice-of-life all at once. Set against the backdrop of the busiest US-Mexico border crossing, Valentina is, at its core, a coming-of-age story. The titular character, played by the ever-magnetic Keyla Monterroso Mejia (One of Them Days, The Studio), navigates parking tickets, odd jobs, and a perpetually precarious checking account balance. In one moment, Valentina cracks jokes about wanting a cosmetic procedure; in the next, she’s pointing out just how much time gig workers like herself waste dealing with bureaucracy. By blending real-life news clips and political interviews with a cinema vérité-style approach to capturing Valentina’s often-humorous day-to-day circumstances, this wholly original film not only deftly highlights the very real trials of growing up in an American border town, but marks Ribeiro as a talent to watch.” —Kate Bove