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“The Story Kept Growing Alongside My Real-life Experience”: Sisa Quispe on Her Student Short Film Showcase Winner Urpi: Her Last Wish
A Peruvian pilgrimage to visit the village of a recently-deceased relative propels the plot of Urpi: Her Last Wish. Helmed by Sisa Quispe as her MFA thesis film at the City College of New York, she also stars as the titular Urpi, a young American woman who travels to the Andes to reconnect with the culture she has long felt severed from.
Guiding her through her personal journey is Sayri (Juan Abel Ojeda Llanos), a local Indigenous man who treks with her to remote villages in order to find the former abode of her grandmother so that Urpi may pay her respects. Though fluent enough in Spanish, Urpi is unable to understand the ancient Quechua language, which Sayri must translate for her. What she soon understands, though, is that the ability to communicate linguistically is tantamount to that of connecting on an innately human level.
Urpi: Her Last Wish is one of five winners of the 2024 Student Short Film Showcase, a collaborative program from The Gotham, Focus Features and JetBlue that is available to stream via Focus Features’s YouTube channel and offered in the air as part of JetBlue’s in-flight entertainment selection.
Quispe chatted with me via email, detailing the multilingual shoot in Peru, the decision to direct herself in the lead role and the funny flub that got caught on camera.
Read the rest of the interviews with the fifth annual Student Short Film Showcase winners here.
Filmmaker: What drew you to the City College of New York for your post-graduate film studies? What has the curriculum imparted on you?
Quispe: What really made the decision clear for me was how diverse and welcoming the MFA film program at City College felt. The students came from so many different backgrounds, and that brought a richness to every discussion and collaboration. I also appreciated how the program let us explore different departments, which allowed me to understand the whole process of making a film. Being in a small cohort also meant I was able to build genuine relationships with both classmates and professors, and being in New York City opened up so many opportunities to connect with the independent film scene. It felt like a place where my voice and perspective would not only be respected but supported.
Filmmaker: Can you speak to the somewhat autobiographical root of this story?
Quispe: When I first started writing the story, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Cusco, Peru. I had decided to spend a few months there, hoping to connect more deeply with my culture. At the time, I didn’t have many friends around me, but I carried a strong desire to understand myself and my family beyond what I had been told or shown growing up.
A couple of months later, one of my grandmothers passed away. I was completely shocked to realize that I didn’t really know where she was from. Just before she died, she had started to open up, sharing with me that her native language was Aymara, and even teaching me a few
words. I was devastated, not just by her passing, but by how much of her story I never had the chance to learn. In my grief, I decided to travel to her hometown in Tacna, Peru, and search for the place she came from. I remember vividly that a song she used to sing was in my head during the journey.
That journey became the foundation of Urpi. The story kept growing alongside my real-life experience. I realized that I wasn’t alone; many people like me were trying to understand where they came from, especially after so much silence or erasure. That realization gave me the confidence to tell this story, knowing it could speak to something larger than myself.
Filmmaker: Tell me about embarking on and completing production in Peru. How long was the shoot? Was there a scene that was particularly difficult or gratifying to pull off?
Quispe: I was really lucky to bring my classmate Zahraa Shams on board as an assistant director. Together, we organized training sessions so that members of the local community could be part of the production team. It was important to me that this wasn’t just a film shot in Peru, but a film made with Peruvians, mostly Quechua people.
The shoot lasted four and a half days, and it was a multilingual experience as well—my AD and DP communicated in English, most of the crew spoke Spanish, and much of the talent were Quechua speakers. However, we made it work. There was a lot of translation, learning, and a shared commitment to the story that brought everyone together.
I remember one of the most difficult scenes to shoot was the one by the stream, where I fall. It took several takes, and I actually fell for real at one point, but no one came to help me because they thought I was still acting! It was a funny moment we caught on camera.
Filmmaker: What were the challenges and rewards of directing yourself in the lead role?
Quispe: Directing myself in the lead role meant constantly wearing two different hats. On one hand, I had to be fully immersed in the emotional reality of the character, and on the other, I had to step back and look at everything from a director’s perspective—framing, pacing, and the overall tone of the scene.
One of the most challenging parts came during post-production. That’s when I really had to be objective about my own performance, which was not easy. I had to watch myself over and over, and make tough decisions, sometimes cutting moments I initially felt attached to, in order to serve the story better.
But there were also rewards. Being both director and actor allowed me to access something deeply personal on screen. I didn’t have to translate the emotion, I was living it. And because I knew the heart of the story so well, I could guide the performance from the inside out. It was exhausting at times, but also empowering. It gave me a new level of trust in myself as both a filmmaker and a storyteller.
Filmmaker: I’d love to know more about how you navigated centering Quechua people, language and tradition in the film. What was essential for you to portray?
Quispe: For me, it was essential to have an accurate and honorable representation of the Quechua people. I approached the story with a deep sense of responsibility, not just as a filmmaker, but as someone who is part of this community. Living in a colonized society, we’re often told our stories through an external lens, so I wanted to reclaim that space and speak from within.
It is important to acknowledge that there are aspects of Quechua life, language, and tradition that can’t always be fully understood through a Western framework. Some things are meant to be felt and lived, rather than explained or specified. So I wanted the film to hold space for that.
By centering the Quechua language, involving local non-actors, and grounding the story in real places and memories, I hoped to create something that felt honest and deeply rooted, not just a story about us, but one that comes from us.
