Los Angeles, CA (October 20, 2026). Executive Producer Eva Longoria releases Jefferson Stein‘s BURROS. The narrative short is a 15 minutes short film. It was released in multiple languages of O’odham, Spanish and English (English subtitles). It was shot on Super 16mm, 2.35:1 aspect ratio, color and released FREE online Wednesday, September 23, 2026 on Vimeo and YouTube.
Logline: A young Indigenous girl discovers a Latina migrant her age who has been separated from her father in the beautiful but dangerous Sonoran desert.
Elsa lives with her father in a trailer on the Tohono O’odham Nation, twenty miles from the Mexico border. One summer morning, her father, a Shadow Wolf late for a shift assisting Border Patrol, tells her to stay put until her grandmother arrives. She does not. Chasing a ball into the brush behind the house, she finds a girl her own age crouched in the shade, lips cracked, shoes torn. Elsa tries speaking to her in O’odham, then English.
The girl finally answers in Spanish. Ena has lost her father somewhere in the desert, but Elsa doesn’t understand any of it. What she does understand is that she has found a friend. Together they set out across the Nation toward the one person who speaks all three languages: Elsa’s grandmother.
The Official Trailer for BURROS Directed by Jefferson Stein
BURROS i shot in four days on Super 16mm in close collaboration with the Tohono O’odham community, in front of and behind the camera. The cast are all first-time actors from the Nation and surrounding communities. Amaya Juan (Elsa) is a local toka team. Zuemmy Carrillo (Ena) is a bilingual elementary school student and Virginia Patricio (Gagi) sang at a local church. Community leaders Larry ‘Bear’ Wilson and the late Camillus Lopez served as executive producers, and Eva Longoria and Sandra Condito joined as executive producers during the film’s Oscar run.
The film premiered at Tribeca in 2021, played 76 festivals on six continents, won 20 awards, and has since screened at the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, and the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.
Release details: BURROS releases free online on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, on Vimeo and YouTube.
Directors Statement
BURROS grew out of two years of research and dozens of trips to the Tohono O’odham Nation. Within the national conversation about immigration and border security, it offers a rarely heard perspective of a Nation whose land the border cuts in half, seen through the eyes of two children who don’t share a language.
How does a community live with a border it did not create? What does it cost to help someone in need in the desert, and what does it cost not to? What does a six-year-old see, and not see, in a world the adults around her have made? The film asks these questions.
What Press Says
“Seldom do I see a film that reverberates with me, down to the core.” Film Threat, 10/10 (Michael Talbot-Haynes)
“The stunning cinematography, by Cole Graham, captures the amazing texture of the ancestral land.” Film Threat
“This is an emotional and very well made short that should be experienced.” UK Film Review (Jason Knight)
One of The Hollywood Reporter’s top 15 Oscar contenders, Live Action Short (2022)
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