After making waves at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Ponyboi has finally made it way to theaters!

Written by rising star River Gallo and based on their short film of the same name, Ponyboi tells the story of a young intersex laundromat attendant and sex worker (played by Gallo) who gets caught up in a drug deal that goes horribly wrong and must flee from both the mob and their angry pimp/paramour Vinnie (a terrifyingly brilliant Dylan O’Brien).

The film also contains stellar performances from stars Victoria Pedretti as Angel, Ponyboi’s best friend and Vinnie’s pregnant partner, Looking and The White Lotus icon Murray Bartlett as a mysteriously handsome cowboy named Bruce, who seems to be the cure to all of Ponyboi’s dilemmas, and Pose alum Indya Moore as Charlie, an old friend of Ponyboi’s.

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Expanding on the brilliance of the short, the feature length-version of the Ponyboi story was directed Colombian American filmmaker by Esteban Arango, who, after being introduced to the script and the original short during the pandemic, loved it immediately and knew he wanted to be a part of bringing it to the world, he told Gold Envelope during a one-on-one chat with us.

“I dove right into the reading, and I was just mesmerized by Ponyboi,” Arango says. “The character and their backstory, the outlook that Ponyboi has on life. I loved it immediately. And then I watched the short film, which had, you know, had a lot of success in the festival run. It was beautiful. It obviously worked on so many levels. But what I thought the script for the feature film offered was a different world, a much more fleshed out world where you can experience a lot more of New Jersey, a lot more of this hypermasculine Italian Mafia world. And so a lot of the aesthetics that came to mind differed from the short film, which I thought was positive, because it just sort of meant that I could bring new life to the project. That was our starting point for the conversations with River and the producers, and the rest is history.”

Arango also expanded more about getting to help tell the story of an intersex character, which mainstream audiences still don’t see enough of, and how being an immigrant and the child of immigrants helped him relate to some of the trials and tribulations Ponyboi has to go through in the film, especially with Ponyboi’s estranged family.

“People always say that Ponyboi is such a hopeless romantic, but what I like to think about Ponyboi is that he is a hopeful romantic,” Arango said when asked about his favorite themes of the Ponyboi film. “Despite all the adversity, the traumatic past, this world that constantly tries to oppress them, Ponyboi still holds on to this idea of romantic love and finding that person that would love them for who they are… this longing to go on that journey to find it and really embody their identity that makes them who they are. I love that search for freedom, the forgiveness the journey to find the full story in order to find the wherewithal to forgive your parents. I that’s a very relatable story for me as an immigrant, because when you come to this country as an immigrant, you have to sort of put in check a lot of things that you inherit from your family. Value systems, traditions that maybe don’t sit right with you within this new context, this new persona that you have to create as you make your way in in America. So I felt like looking at it from that angle, as the immigrant angle. It made a lot of sense. It felt like a universal story to me that way.”

Watch Gold Envelope‘s full interview with Esteban Arango in the video below.

Ponyboi is now playing in select theaters.

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