Mermaids have always been warnings disguised as fantasies. They’re beautiful, unknowable, and caught between worlds. Depending on who tells the story, they’re dangerous women luring men to their deaths or innocent creatures desperate to leave the sea behind. Either way, someone is always trying to control the narrative — and usually the mermaid herself. Kristal Sotomayor’s 11-minute short Las Cosas Que Brillan takes that mythology back from the colonizers.

The film follows Marisol (Josielyn Aguilera), a curious trans Latina mermaid who lives beneath the water with her protective mother, Mami (Asia Monroe). When Marisol discovers a sunken conquistador figurine, she begins asking questions about humans. Why doesn’t he have a tail? What exists above the surface? And why is her mother so afraid of the light?

Mami knows something Marisol doesn’t: What glitters above the water is not meant to illuminate them. It’s designed to attract, extract, and possess.

Still, Marisol does what young people in coming-of-age stories have always done. She ignores her mother and goes looking for answers herself. On land, she encounters a conquistador (Brad Wakeman) who initially greets her beauty with admiration. He offers her a mirror, inviting her to see herself through his eyes. But admiration quickly becomes entitlement. He doesn’t simply want to look at her. He wants to claim her.

In Las Cosas Que Brillan, the distance between being admired and being possessed is only the width of a mirror. That mirror is the film’s most potent symbol. For a trans person, being seen can be affirming, even life-giving. But visibility isn’t automatically freedom. Being visible to people who see your body as a curiosity, fantasy, or object creates its own danger. Marisol’s reflection may be beautiful, but the person holding the mirror still controls its angle.

Sotomayor understands that marginalized people are often asked to celebrate visibility without questioning who benefits from it. We’re told that being seen is progress. We’re rarely encouraged to ask who is looking, what they want, or what happens next. Visibility can be a gift, but it can also be bait.

The conquistador makes the film’s colonial allegory explicit, but not simplistic. He isn’t merely a relic of the past who wandered into a queer mermaid story. His presence connects the extraction of land and natural resources to the attempted possession of racialized, queer, and trans bodies. His gaze transforms Marisol into another dazzling object waiting to be taken.

We understand what the conquistador represents as soon as he appears, and the film has little time to complicate him beyond extraction and violence. But at 11 minutes, Las Cosas Que Brillan operates more like a fable than a psychological drama. Its directness is part of its form. Colonialism isn’t a misunderstanding that needs a more nuanced villain. Sometimes the man arriving with a mirror really is there to take everything that shines.

That violence also shapes Mami’s fear. Her warnings aren’t the usual commands of a parent who refuses to accept her child’s identity. Mami has created an underwater refuge where Marisol can remain curious, loved, and fully herself. Her protectiveness comes from knowing what the surface does to beings it considers “exotic.”

But safety has its limits when it depends on never leaving home. Marisol’s journey isn’t about proving Mami wrong. It’s about gaining the knowledge her mother couldn’t. The film respects ancestral warnings while recognizing that every new generation must eventually decide what to do with them.

Visually, the short rejects realism in favor of something more tactile and enchanted. Its handcrafted ocean, theatrical lighting and practical creatures recall early cinema, children’s television, and the kind of homemade fantasy where the seams are part of the magic.

That choice feels especially meaningful at a time when studios are racing to use artificial intelligence to make images faster and labor cheaper. Las Cosas Que Brillan goes in the opposite direction. Its foam-board sets, physical art pieces, and theatrical compositions bear the evidence of human hands. The film’s visual language supports its politics: beauty doesn’t have to be seamless to hold power.

What makes the film moving is that Marisol’s transformation doesn’t require her to become less curious, less radiant, or less herself. Survival doesn’t mean accepting that Mami was right and the world must remain permanently closed to her. It means learning that her light belongs to her.

Sotomayor has described the film as being about “resilience and finding the light within ourselves.” That idea could easily become sentimental. Here, it doesn’t. Marisol’s light matters because someone tries to possess it, and she refuses to let him.

Las Cosas Que Brillan is small, strange, and lovingly handmade. It offers a trans Latina mermaid who doesn’t surrender her voice for entry into another world. She discovers that not everything offered as admiration is love and not everything that glitters deserves her trust.

The surface may be dangerous. That doesn’t mean it belongs to the conquistadors.

Las Cosas Que Brillan is written and directed by nonbinary Peruvian American filmmaker Kristal Sotomayor. The film was developed with support from the BlackStar Philadelphia Filmmaker Lab and was nominated for Best Short Film at the 2026 Imagen Awards. Screening information is available through Sotomayor Productions.