Catalina Quintana – 2026 Pilot Finalist (Half-Hour)
In The Meantime
After losing the visa-sponsored job that brought her to New York, a directionless aspiring artist has sixty days to find a new sponsor or leave the country. As she navigates the city's artists, eccentrics, and unlikely allies, she's forced to figure out what kind of life she's willing to fight for.
My name is Catalina Quintana. I’m 24 years old, from Bogotá, Colombia, and for most of my life I thought I wanted to make Pixar movies.
Because I could draw, everyone assumed that meant I wanted to be an animator. I assumed it too. Looking back, nobody involved was asking enough follow-up questions. In my defense, I was five.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I didn’t actually care that much about being an animator. What I cared about was story. I wanted to be the person responsible for making strangers laugh, cry, or sit quietly in a parking lot after a movie ended because they suddenly had something to think about.
I grew up in a family where going to the movies wasn’t treated as a luxury or even much of an event. It was just part of life. Some families went to church every Sunday. Some went to temple on Saturdays. We went to the multiplex. I think I still go to the cinema for the same reasons people go to church. Sometimes you’re looking for a truth. Sometimes you’re looking for a miracle. Sometimes you’re just trying to have a conversation with yourself.
What fascinated me wasn’t the escape. It was the return. A film or a show could pull you into a completely different world for two hours and then quietly deposit you back into your own life, except now everything feltslightly different. A good story didn’t remove me from reality. It returned me to reality with new information.
I’ve always cared more about people than situations. I’m interested in contradictions, defense mechanisms, blind spots, ambitions, and all the elaborate stories people tell themselves to make it through the day. Most of my favorite films and television shows are really studies of character disguised as entertainment. Frasier. Girls. BoJack Horseman. Mindhunter. It’s a Wonderful Life, to keep things on theme. Completely different works, all fascinated by the same thing: people.
I love television because it allows characters to reveal themselves slowly. Films often capture transformation, which I also love. But television captures accumulation. You get to watch someone become themselves one small decision at a time.
For a long time, I tried very hard not to become a writer. I studied Visual Arts before realizing I was often more interested in the stories surrounding the work than the work itself. Later, I earned a degree in Audiovisual and Multimedia Communications, which is a very administrative way of saying that I love movies and would like to spend my life making them.
Along the way I worked in illustration, graphic design, and other creative fields. Every few years I convinced myself I had discovered a new calling. Eventually I noticed that every road somehow led back to writing. Which was unfortunate timing. Illustration was supposedly being replaced by AI. Graphic design was supposedly being replaced by AI. Now people tell me writing is next.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re wrong.
Personally, I’m not especially worried. Technology can generate language. Writing comes from being a person. From wanting things, regretting things, embarrassing yourself, falling in love with the wrong person, losing people, changing your mind, and suddenly remembering something you said in 2017 while trying to fall asleep. A machine can imitate a sentence. I’m less convinced it can imitate longing.
My pilot, In The Meantime, grew out of a question I’ve been thinking about for years: what happens when the version of yourself you’ve spent years constructing suddenly stops working? The series follows a young woman whose life is interrupted before she’s ready for it. On the surface it’s about unemployment, immigration, friendship, and adulthood. To me, it’s about the uncomfortable distance between the person you thought you were becoming and the person who’s actually there when the dust settles.
As someone trying to build a career in film and television from outside the industry and outside the United States, that question feels personal. There are days when pursuing this career feels inspiring and days when it feels like a clerical error. Most days it’s both. Chasing a creative dream is difficult for almost everyone. Chasing it from somewhere that wasn’t designed to lead you there can occasionally feel a little absurd.
Ten years from now, I’d love to be running my own series, writing feature films, and publishing novels. Ideally all at once, or simply just writing, although that may require a level of organization that has so far remained entirely theoretical.
For now, I’m simply grateful to be writing. I spent years trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. The answer kept finding its way back to the same place: A blank page.
