**7/10: an unpolished but sincere tribute to the parents who, denied support by the systems around them, built their own community of inclusion instead, proof that the most durable institutions often begin as acts of love between people who refuse to be forgotten.**



Some films are masterpieces; some groundbreaking; and some just have something important to say. This narrative belongs to that last category. Directed by Raúl Camilo as his first feature, and written by Giovanna Bonnelly, *What I Feel For You* is a triptych: a single mother raising two autistic teenagers, a married couple struggling to conceive, and the father of a Special Olympics athlete, that converges into something larger than any one family's private struggle. The story is based on the real experiences of parents, who, finding no adequate support system around them, built one themselves, forming an organization that now advocates for inclusion across the Dominican Republic. That's the quiet, yet radical act at the center of this film.

The script isn't going to win prizes for structural innovation, and the three-story braid occasionally shows its seams, but the narrative doesn't need to be clever because the material is strong enough to carry the narrative and Camilo is smart enough to let it. What struck me watching it is how familiar the isolation felt regardless of language or geography. Parents of children with disabilities everywhere describe the same experience: a society that offers sympathy in the abstract and almost nothing in practice, schools that won't accommodate, doctors who don't listen, neighbors who stare, bureaucracies that treat a child's humanity as a paperwork problem. This is where the film's politics live, not in speeches, but in the accumulated weight of small refusals and the tiny ways a society tells a family they're on their own. Camilo doesn't editorialize; he just shows parents absorbing blow after blow and finding each other anyway.

People are the same everywhere in the world, carrying the same love, the same exhaustion, and when the systems around them fail, they reach sideways instead of up. The organization these three families eventually build isn't the product of policy or charity; it's the product of parents refusing to let their children's exclusion be the final word. They choose to take action that serves others. The sincerity in the film never feels manufactured because it's rooted in the people who actually lived it.

Camilo's first feature went on to become one of the most awarded Dominican films of its year, which tells you something about how hungry Dominican and broader Latin American audiences were to see this particular kind of story told with this much care. It won't appear on anyone's list of formally daring cinema, but craft isn't the only measure of a film's worth. Quiereme Como Soy (Love Me as I Am), the organization that these parents started, was founded in 2011, and since has had a major impact in the Dominican Republic which, hopefully, spilled over into other Latin countries.

It's warm without being saccharine, earnest without being naive, and it trusts its real-life inspiration enough not to oversell it. That restraint is its own kind of achievement, and an overall enjoyable watch.