The Creative Soul of 'Los Frikis': How the Filmmakers Found a Community to Share a Story Unlike Any They’d Known
Oppression starves the soul. Imagine a hunger no food can satisfy, a thirst for freedom beyond poverty, harassment, and misery so severe, you’d invite disease to quench it.
That was Cuba in the late 1980s and early ’90s, where some rockers were so desperate for better conditions under dictator Fidel Castro’s socialist regime that they injected themselves with HIV-positive blood. Authorities sent them to sanitariums, where they lived in relative relief, creating a punk paradise they didn’t realize would cost many their lives.
Such is the true story behind Los Frikis, a Spanish-language drama in limited release this month after earning several film festival awards. It’s the second feature from the writing-directing team of Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, who previously helmed 2019’s The Peanut Butter Falcon.
The two first learned about the real Los Frikis—whose Spanish name is a take on the English word freaky—from friends who are Cuban actors. Although immediately intrigued, they wondered if they, as white filmmakers, were the appropriate storytellers. Their friends and others said, “Yes—just hire the right people and listen,” Schwartz said.
Here, Nilson and Schwartz share how a community of creatives helped them tell this unique story about friendship and joy under wrenching circumstances.
Los Frikis (2024)
Courtesy Lord Miller
A Found Family
Los Frikis has a different setting, language, tenor, and tone than The Peanut Butter Falcon, a warmhearted adventure where a young man with Down syndrome (Zack Gottsagen) runs off to pursue his dream of becoming a wrestler. But Nilson and Schwartz recognized in the Cuban rockers the same questing spark. Castro outlawed rock as “the music of the enemy,” as the opening titles show, and police would harass or arrest punks for being social outliers.
“We like telling stories we hadn’t seen before, stories of outsiders and underdogs because we’ve all felt like that at some point in our lives,” Schwartz said in a recent phone interview.
The pair also liked the idea of the real Los Frikis as a found family. The filmmakers, who met nearly twenty years ago, said they feel like brothers.
Their research began before the COVID-19 pandemic and took roughly four years. They approached the story “like journalists,” Nilson said.
They studied and listened, “surrounding ourselves with people who knew the culture and the stories better than we did,” Schwartz said.
Producer Phil Lord (The Afterparty), who is Cuban-American, came on board, as did several Cuban crew members and actors, including Héctor Medina (Sangre de mi tierra). Medina originally served as a script supervisor, offering suggestions for authenticity, then won the lead role of Paco, the live wire in a blond mohawk who acts like an older brother to the gentler Gustavo (newcomer Eros de la Puente).
The film begins in 1991, after Cuba lost billions in funding from the Soviet Union. Public announcements proclaim Cuba’s greatness while store shelves sit bare. Paco and Gustavo scrape by working in fields day to day between rigging up an antenna on the sly to listen to Nirvana or playing their own music in secret.
“Better to be king in Hell than slaves in Paradise,” Paco sings while shredding on guitar.
Los Frikis (2024)
Courtesy Lord Miller
The Power of Perspective
Los Frikis doesn’t use voiceover narration yet largely unfolds from Gustavo’s perspective, so that viewers experience characters and interactions through him. Around a fire, reluctantly eating a stray killed for food, Gustavo listens as Paco and friends talk about the sanitariums for HIV and AIDS patients. You can have all the food you want there, they muse, but you’d have to be sick.
“In ten years, there’s gonna be a cure, for sure,” one says in painful naivete. “It’s like the flu.”
The characters knowing less about HIV than a modern audience infuses the story with tension, the filmmakers said, even during freewheeling moments at the sanitarium like skateboarding, hiking, and partying on the beach.
Lord pushed the pair to add additional nuance, experimenting with how and when characters know or learn information. As Lord and producing partner Christopher Miller told them, “If you ask an audience to remember ten things, they might remember five.”
At Lord’s advice, the two concentrated different drafts on particular characters to add depth to the whole ensemble, even though Paco and Gustavo’s dynamic anchors the story. Lord would say, “Let’s do a pass that makes Paco tougher and more vulnerable,” said Nilson, adding, “We would do that for the tenth person on the call sheet.”
Light in the Dark
From the setup alone, audiences suspect not all of the film’s friends will survive. But Los Frikis isn’t weighted with melodrama. The friends have a warm, enjoyable rapport, such as when Paco explains the coolness of Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain by saying, “When you know, you know.”
This humor makes their journey more emotional. “The light and the dark deepens the soul sadness,” Schwartz said.
Even if you’re writing a tragedy, try to find moments of levity, he said. After all, characters can’t be nostalgic about the good times if they never have any.
“Independent movies especially go really dark, but in my experience … it doesn’t stay dark for days,” Schwartz said. “Someone will cheer you up. You might even laugh at yourself.”
Los Frikis is now playing in limited release in New York and Los Angeles and will open in select cities nationwide on December 25, 2024.
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