Be & Become
How do I embrace who I am while leaving room for who I am becoming?
An experimental concert film built around Mila Tina’s live drumming, layered with animation, photography, speeches and images. Created as the pandemic began in 2020 and shared with young people through OLA of Eastern Long Island’s Myth & Motion.
To be. To become.
To “be” is to meet the present self with acceptance: what is felt, what is known, what remains unresolved. To “become” is to leave that identity open to possibility, allowing desire, imagination and experience to shape what comes next. Acceptance gives change a place to begin.
Through fire and water, the film enters the aliveness and complexity of Mother Nature, where Mila finds an echo of her own inner world. Rage and resistance widen the frame from personal experience to collective struggle. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” meets images of the protests of 2020, placing the promise of one generation beside the demands of another.
The final movement opens into color, celebration and individual faces. A shared dance takes shape across cultures and ways of being. The journey through darkness returns to the world with a question: how might becoming ourselves also change what we can become together?
Myth & Motion
Virtual event presented by OLA of Eastern Long Island, led by Minerva Perez for young people and their emotional well-being. Singer-songwriter Skylar Day’s “Myth” followed by the concert film of Be & Become.
Live at the Parrish Art Museum
Be & Become performed at OLA’s Pachanga at the Parrish Art Museum, with Svitlana Zavialova (Wu Woman) bringing martial arts and movement alongside the drumming.
Sag Harbor Cinema
Myth & Motion screened in the Under 21 program of OLA’s 18th Annual Latino Film Festival of the Hamptons. The festival program listed it as a 28-minute video concert.
Myth & MotionAn OLA of Eastern Long Island project led by Minerva Perez, produced by OLA Media Lab, featuring Skylar Day and Mila Tina.
Be & BecomeA Mila Tina production in association with OLA of Eastern Long Island.
Executive producerMinerva Perez
Producer, director, live performer, editor and sound mixerCarolina Fuentes, also known as Mila Tina
Assistant director and assistant video editorElizabeth Chavez
Recording, live mixing, camera, video mixing and broadcastingDanny García
Recording engineering, lighting and stage designEdrick Subervi
MakeupDiana Osorio
Parrish performance collaboratorSvitlana Zavialova
Additional music, footage and photography are credited in the film.
How to allow myself to be, while remaining open to what I can become. And how that personal possibility connects to what we might become together.