When a young Mexican-American woman builds a late-night ofrenda for her late mother inside her tiny apartment, she must confront debt, regret, and unspoken truths—forcing her to decide whether she’ll stitch together a future of compromise or risk everything to honor her mother’s legacy of resilience.

SYNOPSIS:

La Ofrenda is an intimate, one-woman chamber drama set entirely within a cramped studio apartment over a single night. ANA, a 20-something Mexican-American sound technician, prepares a Día de los Muertos altar for her late mother. What begins as a tender ritual of marigolds, coffee, and trinkets becomes a raw excavation of memory, guilt, and survival.

Through Ana’s ritual, everyday objects—a faded bus pass, a jar of Vicks, a crumpled napkin—unlock entire worlds. Each item is a portal: to her mother’s tireless sacrifices as a seamstress, to the laughter of neighbors now gone, to the silences that haunted their immigrant household. As Ana places each object on the altar, she wrestles with the choices she made in her mother’s final days, including a devastating decision in a hospital room that still shadows her.

The stakes tighten when Ana confronts an eviction notice and a hard choice between stability and pursuing both her mother’s dream of nursing and her own passion for sound design. With no one to answer but her mother’s photograph, Ana makes a vow: to live visibly, to honor the threads of her heritage without erasing her own voice.

Raw, lyrical, and profoundly human, La Ofrenda is a story about grief, identity, and legacy. It can be produced with virtually no budget—a single performer, a small apartment, and a few everyday props—yet it resonates on a cinematic scale through its emotional intensity. With its sharp writing, vivid imagery, and universal themes of loss and resilience, La Ofrenda is poised to captivate audiences and judges alike, standing as a powerful vehicle for a rising Latina actress and a surefire contender in festivals and screenplay competitions.

LA OFRENDA