Last week we had the opportunity to have an interview with Andrés Palma, the director of the animated film Fulgores, translated as Shimmer, the AAIFF Americas’ Official Selection animated film  which will be screened  at the All Americas’ Film Festival 2025 (AAIFF Americas’) in Mexico city.

Shimmer, directed by Andrés Palma, is not just a visual project-it’s a deeply personal confession about fatherhood and the emotional cost of growing up too soon. Created by a production team based in Mexico. Creative animation, and the strong story of this film will definitely draw you in. 

Spanning five years of production, from 2019 to 2024, the making of the film was filled with unexpected challenges. Andrés Palma said about the production that the process was long, technically demanding, and emotionally exhausting.

But at its core, Shimmer is filled with deep emotional insight. Andrés shared with us during the interview “It is mostly about my fears around the idea of fatherhood. It is about the dad that I fear I could be.” The fear  was there before the first word of the script was written down. That is also how the character Ricardo (character of the father) was written. He comes in as a father who resents fatherhood, not because he is evil, but because he was never meant to be a parent in the first place.

Ricardo became the embodiment of the director’s fear-of who he might become if he were to become a father. But Shimmer is not just about the father. The character of Lucía, Ricardo’s daughter, evolved throughout the writing process and eventually took on a central emotional role. Lucía not only cares for her younger brother – a little boy who’s still a child – but begins to act as a parent to both him and, symbolically, to her own father. Andrés said “Some of the characters are clearly a projection of my fears and problems from childhood. The child that I did not have a chance to be.” The character of Lucía became something much deeper- a reflection of Palma’s own experience when his father began to slip into dementia during the writing of the script.

This life experience happened to Andrés Palma and deeply touched him during the script writing.

“The first few years of this were hell for me and my family, and my brothers and I had to make difficult choices we were not ready to make and reckon with their consequences.”

It was this personal trauma where the character of Lucía found her full meaning.

“If Ricardo was meant to be the personification of my fears around my own fatherhood, then Lucía became an exorcism for all the ways I feel I failed my father as his son.”

Palma even admits that for many, Lucía is the emotional anchor of the film:

“For many people Lucía is the main protagonist, she is standing for my own relationship with my father once he got dementia.” Andrés Palma specified that it showed that in certain life situations the child is taking the parent role and basically being a parent to their parent.

Despite everything, Palma felt supported while producing the film by the people around him. “It is a wonderful team of people that we got surrounded by,” he says. Many of them were his former students: “It was really nice for me to watch them grow. It really showed me what it is like to have a strong team around me.” he added.

Shimmer is therefore not just a story about a family in crisis – it’s also about the reversal of roles, the fear of not being good enough, and the unspoken emotional weight children are sometimes carrying for their parents.

Andrés Palma is thrilled to present Shimmer to audiences at the All Americas’ Film Festival 2025 (AAIFF Americas) in Mexico City on the 15th, 16th and 17th of August 2025 at CINEMANIA, Plaza Loreto.

Come and discover the work of all the talented filmmakers accepted into the Official Selection as well as the promising young talent showcased during the Student Corner.

We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Get your tickets here: All Americas’ Independent Film Festival