Isabel Lamers on Kaya, Mirrors, and Learning to Trust Her Own Gut
Kaya started with a contradiction.
Isabel Lamers was visiting Los Angeles when she met a Filipino American community that took her in without ever questioning how she looked or what her identity was. It was, she says, the opposite of her experience at home in the Philippines.
"Wait a minute," she remembers thinking. "It can feel like you belong when you're not."
Around the same time, she started training in Filipino martial arts with a local team. The two experiences fused, and the story arrived.
"I always wanted to talk about this mixed-race identity heritage that I have," Lamers explains. "But I didn't just want to make it about that. It has to be more."
The result is Kaya, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival and went on to earn a Best Stunts nomination at HollyShorts.
How Much of Nia Is Her
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
"A lot of her stubbornness and refusal to be put into a box is me in there," Lamers says. "And a lot of the mom and daughter dynamic is very much me."
When she brought her family to the Tribeca screening, the reaction was telling. Her mother did not recognize herself in the film at all. Everyone else in the family did.
"Self-perception and reality is sometimes not the same thing," Lamers laughs.
The story itself is fiction, but certain moments come straight from real conversations.
The Mirrors
One of the most striking choices in Kaya is how often Nia is framed through a mirror rather than shot directly. Lamers built the whole visual idea around it, to the point that the film's festival promo item was a pocket mirror.
"The mirrors is basically society's reflection going back to her," she explains. "She defines herself a lot through what other people think and what other people feed back to her."
Which makes the final image of the film a quiet payoff: no mirrors, center framing, just her.
"Symbolizing that she's finally moved on from trying to give a certain reflection of herself, instead of just being and existing."
Directing While Starring
Lamers wrote, directed, produced, and played the lead. She does not entirely recommend it.
The problem was time. With only two shoot days, there was rarely a chance to go back and review a take.
For the fight scenes, she solved it with preparation and trust. Every shot and setup was discussed in advance with the stunt coordinator, who fight-directed from behind the monitors alongside the DP. Because everything had been mapped out in detail, she could trust that someone else knew exactly what she wanted to see.
For the other scenes, it often meant framing at the top and then trusting her cinematographer.
The harder lesson was psychological.
"I felt very awkward to take up so much space and time, because there's a whole 60 people waiting for you to review and then either reset or move on," she says. "That was a great lesson for me to realize that you have to own your creative decisions and not get pressured into, okay, let's just move on."
Building the Fight
The fight between Nia and Angel took weeks.
Choreography sessions started back in LA with the stunt coordinator and fight choreographer, which meant Lamers learned the choreography as it was being created. By pre-production, only her co-star needed to catch up. The team also spent hours on stunt previs, pre-visualizing the fight so they could build a shot list before ever getting to the Philippines.
Throughout, Lamers kept asking one question of her stunt team: does this sell?
Realism mattered to her, especially in how a fighter with less training could still outsmart a master. And the choreography drew on multiple Filipino martial arts styles, including the dirty boxing techniques that target the biceps and muscles. Lamers even pulled moves from a documentary about a famous guru in the Philippines and brought them to her team to work in.
"It's like a breeze working with people like that, because you can just be creative," she says. Rather than shutting ideas down, they accommodated and built.
Translating Feeling Into Sound
Kaya's original score came from composer Carmichael Castaños and Emmy-winning score producer Denise Santos, and it blends Western folk textures with traditional Filipino indigenous instruments and the rhythmic training music used in Filipino martial arts.
That rhythm exists for a practical reason: fighters train to an even pace. Lamers wanted that pulse woven into the film.
Not everything made the cut. Some of the older instruments carried a sound that shifted the tone too far from the action feel they were after, so they were pulled and sometimes reintroduced later.
What impressed her most was the fluency of the people she was working with.
"They basically translate feeling into sound," she says. "You can tell them, I want it to feel like this, and then they will exchange their musical jargon."
The Terror of Showing People What's in Your Head
Premiering at Tribeca was overwhelming in every direction. Sold-out screenings, a red carpet, and her film first in the block, so there was no time to breathe. Twelve minutes and it was over.
But the pressure had started long before the premiere. Because the film was crowdfunded, everyone in her life knew she was making it.
"If you fail, everyone knows that you failed," she says. "People keep asking, so where's the film? It was terrifying in the beginning, because what if no one wants to see it?"
She showed it anyway. "It's our calling. So what are we going to do?"
And then something unexpected happened.
"The thing in my head suddenly was out there, and people were watching the thing in my head."
The Lesson: You Already Know
Ask Lamers what she proved to herself making Kaya, and the answer isn't about talent. It's about instinct.
Early on, the first person she showed the script to called the story unrealistic. Others doubted a first short could get into Tribeca. And Lamers, by her own admission, was someone who listened to everyone but herself.
Then she got on set.
"When they ask me, I already know what I want," she realized. "I'm just not allowing myself to admit that I know."
She has a related warning about sharing too early: an idea in its ideation stage is precious, and it can be crushed.
There's also the story she tells about buying a "Filmmaking for Dummies" book, since she trained as an actor and had no filmmaking background, and then hearing a podcast mock the exact thing she was doing.
"I was so ashamed. I was like, what am I doing? What do I think I'm doing?"
She kept going.
"I'm glad I didn't give up, because you have to start somewhere. Not everyone is blessed with the opportunity to go to art school."
What's Next
Lamers is developing Kaya into a feature, one that travels beyond the Philippines to reflect a more international, bicultural world, and leans further into action.
She's also looking for the right collaborators to produce and build it with her.
"It would be really cool to shoot more action stuff in the Philippines," she says. "We have really cool locations, and I always love the light in the Philippines."
The Takeaway
Kaya is a film about a young woman who stops letting other people define her.
Its director made it by learning to do exactly the same thing.
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