For Filmmaker Kaila Gutierrez, Gymnastics Taught Her When to Walk Away
Nominated by Kaila Gutierrez
Kaila Gutierrez grew up in a household built around sports, a gymnastics coach for a mother, a competitive gymnast for a sister, a softball coach for a father. Her new short film, High Beam, transforms that upbringing into a story about a young gymnast trying to please the mother who coaches her.
Kaila Gutierrez didn't grow up dreaming of film sets, she grew up in gyms, on fields, and in the quiet spaces between practices, watching the women in her family chase excellence in sport.
Her mother coached gymnastics. Her sister competed in it. Her father, a former track star, coached softball, her softball, specifically. Athletics wasn't just a backdrop to her childhood; it was the language her family spoke when words felt too hard.
That upbringing is the beating heart of High Beam, her new sports drama about a young gymnast desperate to make the team and, more than anything, to make her mother-slash-coach proud. It's a story Gutierrez knows intimately, because she lived a version of it herself.
It's easy to think of quitting as a bad thing, especially in sports, where we are constantly taught to never give up. But I think it's important, especially for young women, to learn when to step away from something that doesn't feel right for them.
Before she found softball, Gutierrez was a gymnast herself, by her own admission, not a particularly gifted one. But surrounded by women who excelled at the sport, she felt pressure to follow suit, until she realized she was training for her mother's approval rather than for herself. Walking away from gymnastics was hard, but it became one of the most formative lessons of her life: that knowing when to let go can take as much strength as pushing through.
That lesson now lives inside High Beam, a film Gutierrez calls proud precisely because it doesn't shy away from that tension, the unseen weight of family expectation, and the moment every athlete eventually faces when they must decide whether to keep going or step away. The film screens at NewFilmmakers Los Angeles on September 19
