Out in theaters Friday, ‘Brownsville Bred’ is an intimate portrait of the actor, writer and director as a young girl in 1980s New York.
When Elaine Del Valle was in the sixth grade, she starred in the lead role of Sandy in her school’s production of “Grease.”
Decades later, she would return to that same school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to shoot scenes for her autobiographical film “Brownsville Bred” — which will debut in select theaters nationwide on Friday.
Tethered to the people and places that shaped her into the person she’s become, Del Valle, 54, has been working on this intensely personal project for over 16 years. Now a filmmaker, she began her entertainment career as an actor and later as a casting director.
Before reaching its final cinematic form, “Brownsville Bred” first had other iterations: a one-woman stage show, a novel, and a TV pilot doubling as a short film.
“I knew all along that I wanted to make ‘Brownsville Bred’ into something that people could see visually on screen, and that it could be shared more widely. But I never really had the resources,” she says from her home in New York during a recent video call.
The feature film fictionalizes Del Valle’s childhood and adolescence during the 1980s in the titular underprivileged Brooklyn neighborhood, where crime and drug use were just as quotidian as the sounds of salsa music and memorable family moments.
Central to this heartfelt coming-of-age story is Del Valle’s complicated relationship with her vivacious but troubled Puerto Rican father, a musician struggling with addiction who, after a stint in prison, returned to the island while she was still young.
For the scenes depicting Elaine (played as a teen by Nathalia Lares) visiting her father Manny (Javier Muñoz) in Puerto Rico, the writer-director chose to shoot on location in the town of Cataño where her father, the real-life Manny, was from. Bringing the film there reinforced Del Valle’s sense of belonging in her Boricua identity.
“People say to me, ‘Elaine, you’re so happy all the time. You’re so energetic, you’re so willing, what is that?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know, that’s just me. And after filming in Puerto Rico, I feel strongly that it is part of the culture there, because I felt that in every single person that was on set with me.”
Still from Elaine Del Valle’s Brownsville Bred, opening Sept. 19, 2025.
(Benjamin Medina)
Growing up in a low-income community, Del Valle couldn’t fathom a path into the performing arts. She married at 18 years old and had a daughter not long after. Around that time, she attended an event put on by the Hispanic Organization of Latino Actors. There, she learned she needed headshots to start reaching out to agents and going out for roles.
“I knew that I wanted more out of life, and I would take my daughter with me in her baby carriage to auditions,” she recalls. A determined Del Valle quickly found success as a bilingual actor for commercials. Eventually, Del Valle also landed the voice role of Val the Octopus, a motherly figure in the now-beloved animated series “Dora the Explorer.”
In the late 2000s, as she studied acting at Carnegie Hall, she started writing down her most significant childhood memories encouraged by her instructor Wynn Handman. She wrote about 10,000 words before deciding to adapt the text into prose that she could speak out loud in front of an audience. Recounting her foundational experiences became a cathartic, healing process. That’s when “Brownsville Bred” took the form of a one-woman stage play.
In 2009, Del Valle started performing the inspirational account numerous times at schools and corporate events; by 2011, it was off-Broadway.
“The audience reception made me understand how important this story was, not just to me and my artistry and my ability to heal as a human, but also to other people who needed those things as well, and to see themselves reflected on screen,” she recalls.
It was thanks to one of those performances that Del Valle got offered a job as a casting director. Her credentials: “I had been to every casting office in New York as an actor.”
To support her intention of one day turning this personal narrative into a film, Del Valle decided to turn it into a book so that she could own it as an intellectual property. These days, that’s become common practice in Hollywood: turn the story into a book, so that the screenplay is no longer an original creation, but an adaptation of an intellectual property.
The audiobook version of the tome, published in 2020, was narrated by Del Valle herself.
Del Valle first stepped behind the camera when she couldn’t find a director to helm her 2013 web series “Reasons Y I’m Single.” She had written the project, cast the actors, scouted locations and was ready to serve as producer — but in the end, “by default,” as she says, she had to direct it.
“That is where I really found my passion to work with actors and to get them to where I thought that they could get to,” she explains. “I do like directing more than acting, because I still get to act,” she says. “I am a scene partner as a director.”
Director Elaine Del Valle poses with her brother, Benjamin Medina, who also worked on set.
The road to finally bring “Brownsville Bred” to the screen was in motion when Del Valle received funding from WarnerMedia OneFifty, an artist development initiative, to produce a pilot that could serve as proof of concept for an episodic series. With that grant, the filmmaker would shoot the first 15 minutes of narrative, which played at multiple festivals as a short piece.
Del Valle’s experience as a casting director proved an advantage when she needed to cast the young woman who would play her in most of the film. Her search came down to two finalists, and ultimately Lares reminded her more closely of who she was at that age.
“The other girl is who I wanted to be when I was growing up, because she was so cool and tough,” Del Valle says. “And Nathalia was actually who I was growing up, which was very vulnerable.”
Muñoz, in turn, convinced Del Valle he could play Manny because of his musicality and talent for singing, qualities her father had. It was an Instagram video of Muñoz singing inside an empty New York subway car that solidified her belief in the actor. That Muñoz is an HIV activist also made him an ideal candidate, since Del Valle’s father lost his life to AIDS.
For the most part, reliving some of the most painful experiences of her early years while shooting didn’t affect Del Valle. Yet, she still needed to tap into her lived experience to guide the actors as they navigated this fiction constructed from her former reality.
“Leaning into the emotion a lot of the times was for them, always healing, but definitely for them, so that they can feel secure in the choices they were making to honor my story,” she says. “Sometimes they needed that more than I did. But every time I shared with them I was able to grow from that experience as well, to give them what they needed, but also feel it.”
Film still from the movie ‘Brownsville Bred,’ directed by Elaine Del Valle.
To produce the rest of the film, Del Valle invested her own savings, and utilized any cost-effective opportunity. At a party, she met the owner of a disheveled building in Queens, and asked if she could film there before they renovated it. On the corner near that building she found a Latino-owned pizzeria, and after explaining the significance of the story, the owner let her shoot there. She was cleverly frugal to bring it to fruition.
Through all the transformations from one medium to the next, the unchangeable essence of “Brownsville Bred” is “showing the contradictions in who we are, because so many times Latinos are seen as one dimensional,” Del Valle thinks. “This very much shows the layers of who made me who I am. I am urban, I am American, I am Latina, I’m Puerto Rican, I’m a daughter and a mother,” she adds.
“Brownsville Bred” ends with a quote by Del Valle for her father: “I made it mean something, Papa.” For the multihyphenate, the film is the culmination of a lifelong dream to honor him in all his complexity, both the joy and pain that they share in their time together.
“This film made his life mean something,” she says, barely holding back tears. “It made his experience mean something. It made his death mean something. I got to give him a legacy.”
Simultaneously, “Brownsville Bred” bears witness to what she overcame to accomplish this feat. “We all have our struggles and I’ve always believed that it is up to us to turn those struggles into triumph,” she explains. “We don’t have to wallow in the misery that people expect us to be wallowing in. We can use those obstacles and stand on them. And I did.”