An avant-garde artist couple on the brink of eviction find themselves transforming their broken home into a delicate refuge of love and rebirth. While Walter takes up delivery work and Ama struggles to conform to an office job, their devotion to art and each other is tested, leading them toward a sweet yet tragic act of creation.

Written & directed by Sofía Batres.

Rooted in decolonial futurism, Ama & Walter transforms how we have come to understand home—beyond borders and permanence. Blending surrealist and sonic textures, performance, and decay, the film reclaims creation as a means of survival— where art becomes a living archive of displaced memory and care.

The film is based on the story of the tragedy of Lavina & Walter Schultz, two dancers from the 1920s who performed in handmade masks and makeshift costumes that blurred the lines between body and spirit, creation and ruin. They lived in a basement, slept in hammocks, refused payment for performances, all the while dancing in heavy-weighed costumes, in pieces that demanded exhaustion until their death came in 1924. With Ama & Walter, I want to honor their story by reimagining their devotion to art within a world that measures worth through work.

Ama is a woman who has lived a life refusing relief. From a young age, all she has known is leaving her shoes next to her bed in case she has to leave at night. Walter, a man with a bamboo bike strapped tightly on him, is a person in love with the impossible.

In a small apartment blooming with decay and invention, Ama and Walter—two partners and artists—build worlds out of what’s been discarded. They live in a world of handmade masks, improvised dances, and fragile joy, surviving on scraps while struggling to make ends meet.

Walter rides along working as a deliveryman– where he befriends a young boy named Tyger. Meanwhile, Ama tries to join the workforce, dressing for an office job she never makes it to — her body and spirit resisting a world that demands she trade art for stability.

As their home slowly empties, and their creations decay, an idea in Walter, inspired by Tyger, comes to life, as a final attempt to “fix” their dilemma– however this doesn’t come in time.

In the end, unable to separate their art from their lives, Ama and Walter fall into a tragic, dreamlike unity — their bodies turning blue.

The film reflects on how their passion and creativity–unseen and uncompensated– mirror the quiet struggle of making something beautiful in a system that rarely rewards it.

Ama & Walter signifies the radical choice it is to regain one's own autonomy—to choose a different pathway for yourself that works directly against the perpetual violence that comes from colonial and western ideologies and practices. It means going home.

Being Peruvian-Guatemalan-American (so many hyphens, but I just might simply be a Jersey girl), when I think about home I think about where we are going to and where we are coming from. I think about my late grandmother Sandra who worked until her body couldn’t anymore. I think about how I come from a community of women who have and continue to flee places where violence is being done to their land, where violence is being done to their bodies– and I’m tired.

I’m tired of my people carrying things— heavy, things- things that make your biceps flex and legs wobble, but I see us carrying nonetheless. Maybe I’m greedy, but I want Ama & Walter to stay– to rest & sleep in. To create whatever they desire and do what they love. I don’t want Walter to have to carry their house on their shoulders– and Ama doesn’t want that either.

This is also a love story above all else.

& when I think about love, I think about my mom who I know will hold me in every lifetime, I think about my dad who will carry a 3-story stainless steel building if it meant it’d take a weight off of me and my brothers back, and I dream of worlds where my people are valued for more than what they can produce.

I want to create a world with characters that are allowed to be a liberated people– in whichever realm that might be found in.

This is my inheritance!