A mother searches the Florida backcountry for her youngest son, who vanished during a restroom stop while she was trying to keep her sister from being deported. That is Malabar, and in May 2019 HBO acquired it.
The film premiered at the 2019 Miami Film Festival and then ran on HBO's platforms from 2019 to 2021, according to 66 Films, the Miami company that produced it with FilmGate Miami. Freddy Rodriguez wrote, directed and edited it; Diliana Alexander was executive producer. The credits list Liz Pasillas as "Producer and Co-screenwriter".
She took the story on to keep the characters' culture right.
"I was very fortunate to co-write this story with Freddy, making sure the cultural essence of the characters was genuine," Pasillas wrote when the acquisition was announced. "I also took on the role of one of the producers of the film side by side with the executive producer Diliana Alexander."
It was made during the Miami years, when New Discovery Media was a production house working in film, branded content and its first 360° experiments. The subject matter — a family pulled apart by immigration enforcement — runs close to the work the founders took to Ciudad Juárez, where they built Ruta Norte, a virtual-reality documentary on migration, in 2021.