Teenager Rico is struggling to make a living, and transitioning into fatherhood is not as easy as he imagines. Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) plays at Manchester Film Festival 2026.
It took me quite a while into the Manchester Film Festival screening of Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) for me to realise how I should be watching this film.
Going in cold, it felt at the start like I was about to watch a drama centred around a family with Dominican Republic roots living in a small apartment in the Bronx – Mami Andrea (Yohanna Florentino), 19-year-old son Rico (Juan Collado) and 17-year-old daughter Sally (Nathaly Navarro). We get to know their apartment, the love/hate sibling relationship, the tired mom trying to hold everything together. Then Rico’s 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) moves in too, putting even more pressure on family life.
But gradually, it becomes obvious that this is the background to what is actually a comment on lost masculine role models and the consequences for younger men. With an absent father, Rico is ‘performing’ his idea of fatherhood without any concrete guidance or support. Getting a regular job becomes a priority for him to reach his goal of provider, but at a point where other young men of his age are enjoying some freedom on the beach with friends in the summer, Rico hasn’t quite got the memo that having a job is hard work with early hours and late finishes, and if that’s the job you have, then you have to adapt to it or find something else.
Although not a criticism, the low budget is obvious on screen; the family apartment set is small and there aren’t that many places to put a camera, so many of the shots were from the same viewpoint. And the frequent yelling over each other may have been realistic in its depiction of family arguments, but it sometimes made things difficult to follow.
I also think there’s an element of the physical screening at play here – the volume was set a tad too high, and the screens at the cinema which MFF is using are desperately in need of a clean because even the outside beach scenes looked murky.
Perhaps Mad Bills to Pay … was a little repetitive in parts, but there must be thousands of young men like Rico, whose story this film tries to tell.
Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) plays at Manchester Film Festival (19th – 29th March 2026).
Teenager Rico is struggling to make a living, and transitioning into fatherhood is not as easy as he imagines. Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) plays at Manchester Film Festival 2026.
It took me quite a while into the Manchester Film Festival screening of Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) for me to realise how I should be watching this film.
Going in cold, it felt at the start like I was about to watch a drama centred around a family with Dominican Republic roots living in a small apartment in the Bronx – Mami Andrea (Yohanna Florentino), 19-year-old son Rico (Juan Collado) and 17-year-old daughter Sally (Nathaly Navarro). We get to know their apartment, the love/hate sibling relationship, the tired mom trying to hold everything together. Then Rico’s 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) moves in too, putting even more pressure on family life.
But gradually, it becomes obvious that this is the background to what is actually a comment on lost masculine role models and the consequences for younger men. With an absent father, Rico is ‘performing’ his idea of fatherhood without any concrete guidance or support. Getting a regular job becomes a priority for him to reach his goal of provider, but at a point where other young men of his age are enjoying some freedom on the beach with friends in the summer, Rico hasn’t quite got the memo that having a job is hard work with early hours and late finishes, and if that’s the job you have, then you have to adapt to it or find something else.
Although not a criticism, the low budget is obvious on screen; the family apartment set is small and there aren’t that many places to put a camera, so many of the shots were from the same viewpoint. And the frequent yelling over each other may have been realistic in its depiction of family arguments, but it sometimes made things difficult to follow.
I also think there’s an element of the physical screening at play here – the volume was set a tad too high, and the screens at the cinema which MFF is using are desperately in need of a clean because even the outside beach scenes looked murky.
Perhaps Mad Bills to Pay … was a little repetitive in parts, but there must be thousands of young men like Rico, whose story this film tries to tell.
Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) plays at Manchester Film Festival (19th – 29th March 2026).
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