Dani Buzman | Who Raised You? / 2025

the families who disappeared

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dani Guzman (screenwriter and director) Who Raised You? / 2025 [10 minutes]

 

This is a story about death. First, and perhaps most importantly, the death of the gay man Robert’s (Nick Salem) lover Raul (Lawrence Murphy III).

     It is the AIDS crisis of the 1980s when Robert meets Raul and the two become lovers. No space in this film is given over to the disease, the suffering, or the death. The two meet up and their relationship is simply over, as it was for so many loving couples of that period whose lovers were suddenly infected with HIV and soon after contracted AIDS, dying in those endless years of gay death.

    Gay Chicano writer Dani Guzman himself expresses the situation quite nicely:

 

“Created as my final thesis at NYU Tisch, I sought a humanistic, personal lens to do justice to the agony and ecstasy endured by lovers whose stories were affected by the AIDS epidemic. As a Queer Chicano, I have experience with the delicate act of concealing myself in “polite” spaces, aware of the repercussions of living in open opposition to the deeply-held prejudices of others. When the people you have to hide from are the same people meant to love and nurture you, it can damage you in ways that bleed into your interpersonal relationships and motivate you to separate from them entirely. In the era of sexual liberation beyond the Stonewall riots, the mass exodus of Queer people fleeing their hometowns to “gay ghettos” made the imminent arrival of AIDS all-the-more traumatic and personal. As people lost members of their newly-formed families, many had already severed connections to their once familiar homes. My fascination with the emotional journeys of our Queer community superseded any urge to dramatize the traumatic magnitude of the period, instead highlighting a single story of desire to represent infinite like it. Who Raised You? is a love story told posthumously, following a character whose commitment to feel his late lover’s presence once more brings him to the same family his partner ran away from.”

 

Robert shows up at the doorstep of his dead lover’s family at an unfortunate moment, the death of the mother. He meets Raoul’s sister Belinda (Destiny Leilani Brow) smoking the side of the house as other family members celebrate at the “celebration of her life” in the back yard. Recognizing him, without having even met him, she leads him on as he has brought with him a floral arrangement for the mother, attempting to reconnect with Raoul’s family. Belinda leads him into the room where his mother is, he discovering her in bed, dead.

     He has come at the wrong time. Still he persists, sitting down with her for a short while, attempting to explain who he is, and trying to find the words to explain his presence.

     For a moment, she is cruel, bluntly asking “Did you get what you wanted?” after explaining that her beloved brother left her when she was eight years of age, bitter perhaps that this stranger has gotten to know her brother far better than she has.

    Yet, life has gone on, as her young daughter interrupts their conversation, and Robert prepares to leave, embarrassed now for his attempt to connect up with a family that has suffered two deaths.

     But, at the last moment, she does hug her brother’s lover close, assuring him that he can call her at any time just to talk.

   Robert leaves, rather heart-broken yet again over his desperate attempt to make contact with Raoul’s family.

    Yet the film ends with a vision of the two men in bed, as lovers. Robert has those memories, while the family, prejudiced against even those they loved, have nothing to face but the empty canvas of death.

    As for the question of the title, it is apparent, that Raoul was forced to raise himself, although with the love he found in the gay community of the day, which tragically also meant his early death. The irony and pain of this small work is evident. Both families have failed this beautiful individual, although he has, finally, found a man with whom he could share love.

     Meanwhile, Robert is left without his lover, and without the connection to his family, reliant now on a fractured community being unintentionally destroyed from within.

 

Los Angeles, May 12, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).