Through the Lens of Family
Inside UCLA's Center for Ethnocommunications courses, students learn documentary filmmaking skills and how to think carefully about intimacy, memory and the ethics of storytelling. For Eliana Bernstein and Milagros Perez, that process led them back toward their own families — and toward difficult conversations about grief, displacement and identity.
Bernstein, a political science major and professional writing minor from the Pacific Palisades, entered the class intending to document the logistical realities of wildfire recovery. As deputy executive director of the Palisades Recovery Coalition, she spends her final year as a UCLA student helping connect residents with agencies and public officials navigating the aftermath of the 2025 fires.
Storytelling, however, has long lived alongside Bernstein's interests in policy and public life. She described writing and reading as central creative outlets growing up and credits UCLA's professional writing minor with opening unexpected pathways. The program introduced her to grant writing, legal memoranda and creative nonfiction, which she described as "almost like group therapy." What began as an elective requirement ultimately became something that, in her words, "changed my life."
But under the guidance of Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker and professor Renee Tajima-Peña, Bernstein's Ethnocommunications project shifted inward. Instead of focusing on policy, she turned the camera toward her mother, a rabbi whose synagogue community was deeply affected by the fires. The resulting short film became a meditation on grief, memory and rebuilding after catastrophic loss.
"She's talked a lot about how that was hard to let go of," Bernstein said of the family photographs and inherited objects lost in the fire. "But also about how a new form of community and intimacy and closeness with the people in your neighborhood has just flourished under this."
Milagros Perez, an international development studies student from Moreno Valley, also found herself using film to navigate deeply personal terrain. Perez enrolled in two different Center for Ethnocommunications courses, continuing a project that evolved across time. Her short documentaries explore the emotional realities surrounding vulnerable immigration status through the experiences of her older sister, a DACA recipient.
Her sister had built a career helping others through counseling and recovery-related work after pursuing higher education, accomplishments Perez admired growing up. The project that emerged was a way of seeing someone she thought she already knew in a different light.
Over multiple interviews, her sister spoke more openly about fear, identity and uncertainty, Perez said. And family moments Perez was too young to recall began to crystallize.
Both students said the skills they learned in these deeply personal projects will serve them well as they move into the working world.
