The Story
NEON DREAMS is an intimate feature documentary about legacy, migration, and a disappearing craft, told through the family of filmmaker Stephanie Romero: master neon artisans who spent fifty years shaping Los Angeles in neon lights.
Stephanie never learned their craft. She found her own. Trained in film and art history, she traces neon's rise and fall alongside her family's, examining it as an American art form.
Now she is the one who comes back with a camera, recording what her family built and asking what it cost them. She thought she was filming an ending. It's just the beginning.
Raul
RAUL has worked at Heaven or Las Vegas, the largest neon rental prop house in the country, for over thirty years. He is Stephanie's father and one of the few in the family still working in neon.
The signs he fabricates, installs, repairs, and rents out have lit film sets, storefronts, and streets across Los Angeles. The film follows him as he faces a crossroads in his career.
Pilar
PILAR learned to bend neon at the age of eleven. Her father taught her, and he made small tools customized for her hands when he saw her interest and talent. She worked daily for her father and later for neon shops across Los Angeles, eventually becoming known as a master in the field.
She later stepped away from neon when she became a mother, leaving the trade to raise her daughter, Stephanie. The film follows her return to the craft and the emotional history that lives inside that return.
Stephanie
STEPHANIE is the voice of the film. She is off screen, asking the questions, threading decades of family and neon history together through narration.
Trained in art history and film, she examines neon as a legitimate art form, not just her family's trade. She is not a neutral observer. The story she is telling is the one she was born into.
The Hernandez Family
Stephanie's grandmother and uncles, seventy years of family who all touched the craft in their own way.
Their stories fill in the film: how neon entered the family through her grandfather Julio, the patriarch and the first to learn the craft, and how the family built a world around it in the United States. He passed before filming began. Together, they bring him back.
Visual Approach
NEON DREAMS is shot on analog 16mm film to honor an analog craft, with interviews on digital so the family can speak freely and without time constraints. The medium holds neon's color, texture, and glow in a way that feels true to the material. The visual language blends portraiture, process, and memory.
The film features interviews and voiceovers from Stephanie’s family, alongside carefully composed portraits of them, inspired by still photography and b-roll of neon being made.
Observational footage follows hands through the stages of the craft, capturing the patience, heat, and precision behind each piece.
Archival materials, including VHS footage, film, and photographs, connect past and present and reveal a lineage built through labor and love.
Why NOw?
The artisans who hold this knowledge are aging, and the places that held their work are changing. NEON DREAMS preserves a disappearing art form and the people who carry its history. Neon is vanishing in real time, and with it, the lived knowledge of the artisans who built it, the community around it, and the stories behind the glow many people take for granted.
The film documents craftsmanship, labor, and immigrant success stories that have often remained in the background, and it does so through an analog medium that mirrors its subject.
Told from inside the world of neon, the film offers a perspective shaped by proximity, reverence, and lived experience. With rare access through her family, director and producer Stephanie Romero films with intimacy, trust, and care.
NEON DREAMS is both a cultural record and a personal portrait, holding the glow while it is still here.
Now in production and post.
All interviews are complete, with final verité filming following the story as it unfolds. Post-production runs through 2027, built on editing, original voiceover, archival research, and the digitization of fifty years of family archive.
NEON DREAMS is currently seeking production and post-production partners, financing, and distribution.
The film is directed by Stephanie Romero, produced by Romero and Katie Jung, and written by Romero and Jung.