Filmmaking and human-centered engineering are an unlikely combination, but the two complement each other in La Siembra, an Eagle-produced documentary featuring an Indigenous community in Ecuador and a group of Boston College students working to create a way to conserve water for the dry season.
Cyrus Rosen, MCAS ’25, and John Mendizabal, BC ’23, both studied abroad in Ecuador during the summer of 2023. During the month they were there, their group spent 10 days engineering solutions to water constraints facing the San Clemente community.
The most critical component of their service, according to Rosen, was not the water-conservation invention they ultimately created but their conversations with Indigenous community members. In order to find a successful solution, they had to focus on listening first, Rosen said.
“I think the one word that was always emphasized by Glenn and the program and by ourselves was listening,” Rosen said. “It’s very easy to interject or jump to your own conclusions, but you really have to take a step back and listen—listen actively.”
Without intentional conversations with the San Clemente community, Rosen said he and Mendizabal’s work wouldn’t have been impactful.
“Sometimes it’s just facilitating a conversation and also making sure that the trade-offs of what you’re doing don’t outweigh the positive impact of what you’re doing,” Rosen said. “Sometimes it can be more damaging to do something than not to do something at all.”
Rosen said the Indigenous community welcomed the BC students’ efforts to engineer a solution for them, and the BC students endeavored to not disappoint. With a limited amount of time and resources, Rosen helped build a gray water filtration system for his host mother, Susana Pupiales, to recycle water for her garden.
“The project, the pilot system that we implemented, was actually in my host mother, Susana’s, backyard, and it was a gray water filtration irrigation that is more water efficient,” Rosen said. “And so that enabled her, for the first time, to be able to grow a small plot of vegetables during the seasonal dry season, where before they would be able to grow no fresh vegetables at all.”
To further alleviate the tight water constraints the community was operating under, Will Purnell, a fellow member of the trip and MCAS ’25, helped build a fog net to collect morning dew and store it as a water supply for the locals.
Though the group created tangible projects addressing water concerns, Rosen said that he wanted his impact to be larger than the things they created.
“More than anything that we actually built in our time there … I’d like to think at least that the impact that we made was just about the interpersonal connections we made with the community,” Rosen said.
Prior to the study abroad trip, Rosen was given the opportunity to apply for the Salmanowitz Progam, a BC grant that gives students funding to create films abroad. While talking to his mom about these two opportunities, Rosen said she brought up the idea of combining the projects.
“I was like, ‘How do I do both?’” Rosen said. And then she’s like, ‘What if you combine these two projects and make a film about your engineering project?’ And I was like, ‘You’re so right.’”
Originally co-workers at The Hatchery, Rosen and Mendizabal decided to work on the documentary together. With a mother from Ecuador, Mendizabal said his ties to the country run much further than the month-long trip with BC that inspired the project.
“I think our work ethic on this project kind of inspired each other, because at the time, I remember telling him once, this is the most meaningful and inspiring work that I’m doing, right now,” Mendizabal said. “This film—it’s about my family. It’s about my mom’s country. It’s about this really wonderful group of people that are working together to solve this problem and their story needs to be told.”
Rosen and Mendizabal said the ultimate goal of producing La Siembra was to share the story of the San Clemente community they had come to love during their time abroad. One scene from the documentary shows the group riding in a car, struggling with the idea of how to leave the community in a better state than when they arrived.
“There’s a couple scenes where we’re essentially debating this question about whether it is okay to build something that we think may benefit the community, but in the long term, maybe just won’t work in a couple months, or it was just a bad solution to begin with,” Purnell said. “I don’t know if that’s actually something we solved.”
After leaving Ecuador, Rosen and Menizabal finalized the documentary together. Though he never expected to produce a project like this, Mendizabal said La Siembra’s importance to him cannot be understated.
“I’m super stoked with the final edit of the film,” said Mendizabal. “I never thought that I’d be teaching or doing anything related to videography, but it’s fun and funny how life introduces passions to you at random points.”
Rosen also said that the San Clemente community was excited to have their story reach a larger audience.
“I think they were very excited about the prospect of their community and their story getting told outside of their very small kind of circle of influence, to have eyes on what their values are and what they’re trying to accomplish—over in America and hopefully in the future spread around Ecuador as well—is actually exciting to them,” Rosen said.
Purnell said Rosen’s commitment to creating a realistic film without imposing a narrative makes the film particularly vivid and memorable
“There’s a scene where we fall into, like, a ditch because we had to cross a ravine every day,” Purnell said. “[The documentary] wasn’t kinda trying to make up any story that wasn’t there. It was just trying to represent our experience as a whole.”
Though most of the group was not able to speak conversational Spanish with the San Clemente community, Rosen said they nonetheless were able to build lasting connections.
“I actually wasn’t expecting how much we would end up connecting with the Indigenous families we stayed with,” Rosen said. “I’m still in touch with them over WhatsApp,”
Upon completing La Siembra, Rosen said many of his favorite moments were not filmed and would never get shared, which he initially found frustrating. But eventually, Rosen said he realized that filmmaking is about more than the files on his SD card.
“The most special moments of connection can only happen off camera,” Rosen said. “So that was an interesting, just like personal lesson for me as a filmmaker going forward as well, that sometimes you gotta let go of trying to get everything and just as important as what you do capture is also like the actual, genuine connections you’re making with the people who are in your film.”
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