Leave No Trace
Leave No Trace (a short film)
During a family trip to White Sands, a teenage girl struggling with her parents’ unraveling marriage is forced into a fight for survival when extreme heat turns an ordinary hike into a crisis, confronting her with a world—and a childhood—that can no longer remain unchanged.
Meet the Creators
Together, we are shaping an intimate New Mexico story in which landscape and character can carry equal emotional weight.
Estrella Tamez - Writer/Creator/Alicia
Actor, writer, creator, producer and director with extensive experience in film, television and theatre. Writing credits include Leave No Trace, Where the Ocean Meets the Sky, Sky Crashing and In the Zoom Room; onscreen credits include General Hospital, Passions, Without a Trace, Commander in Chief and NYPD Blue.
Rhianna Basore - Director/Creator
Award-winning director/producer, international actor and professional writer whose work spans film and theatre. Her directing credits include the award-winning stage production and critically acclaimed film Crapshoot!, and her producing credits include In The Zoom Room and Crapshoot!.
Cinematographer
TBD
Writer's Statement
Leave No Trace grew out of something that has stayed with me for years: the stories of hikers who set out for what should have been an ordinary day outdoors and never made it home.
I have followed accounts of hikers becoming lost or stranded in extreme heat, sometimes after what seemed like a very small mistake or change in circumstances. Those stories have always affected me because of how quickly the familiar can become dangerous. A trail, a family outing, or a beautiful landscape can change in a matter of hours.
Another influence came from what I witnessed during the COVID pandemic. Months of lockdown forced families into an unusual kind of closeness, and I watched relationships and marriages around me begin to unravel under that pressure. It stayed with me how quickly the stability of a family could shift, especially through the eyes of children caught in the middle.
Those two ideas eventually came together in Leave No Trace. I wanted to place a teenage girl in a physical survival situation while she was already experiencing a different kind of upheaval at home. She enters the dunes carrying the emotional weight of her parents’ unraveling marriage, and suddenly she is faced with something much more immediate: surviving long enough to find her way home.
Setting the story at White Sands was important to me. New Mexico is extraordinarily beautiful, but that beauty can also be deceptive. The openness, heat, distance, and seemingly endless landscape of the dunes create a place where someone can feel both completely free and completely lost.
Climate change also influenced the story. As temperatures rise and extreme heat becomes an increasing reality, environments we think we understand can become more dangerous. I wanted that reality to exist within the film without turning the story into a message about climate change. It is simply part of the world this girl is trying to survive.
Ultimately, Leave No Trace is about how fragile our sense of security can be. We believe we know where we are going. We believe the people we love will always be there. We believe we have more time. And then something happens that forces us to see our lives differently.
For me, the film asks a simple question: What happens when the world you thought you could depend on suddenly disappears?
We look forward to bringing this story to you.
Thank you for your support,
Estrella
Photo courtesy of National Park Service