When I Heard the Future: Discovering Rosalía Before the World Did
In early 2017, I was deep in a screenplay set inside the world of flamenco, a culture I’d come to love through Lorca, for its rawness and ritual. One night, while researching, I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and found a young singer from Spain. No label. No press. No website. Nobody. Just her voice… ancient and electric at once. Her name was Rosalía.
Something in me froze. I remember thinking: she’s the future of flamenco. I was so struck that I wrote a whole scene in my screenplay with her in it, this unknown singer named Rosalía, juxtaposing her modern sound against a purist. In fact, I wrote one character saying to another, with certainty, “She is the future of flamenco.” It was a moment meant to bridge past and future, tradition and transformation.
Back then, no one around me knew her name. In the States, you couldn’t buy her album or stream her music. She didn’t even have a website. Nothing. I posted about her on Facebook, gushing over this modern cantaora reinventing a centuries-old art form. Not one of my Spanish friends responded. I still have that screenshot…
More or less a year and a half later, in Autumn 2018, Malamente dropped, and the world tilted. Suddenly there she was on billboards across Madrid, later on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, collaborating with The Weeknd, redefining pop and fashion at once. Watching it unfold was surreal. My Spanish friends began writing me: “You saw her first. You—an American—recognized her first.” And they were right.
That early encounter with Rosalía became more than a story about spotting talent. It was a reminder of how vision collides with timing, and how broken systems can keep brilliance from reaching the world. Those same systemsth, e ones that decide who gets financed, who gets heard, and who gets believed, kept that screenplay from being made, despite A-list talent attached. They’re the same systems that have long shut out women, people of color, and anyone outside the industry’s narrow mold. That frustration became the fuel for my creation of Film3™ - a model built to liberate artists from gatekeepers, giving power back to creators who’ve been denied opportunity not for lack of vision, but for lack of access.
Now, with GenAI’s new tools in hand, that liberation feels real. I created a concept music video inspired by the only song on the Malamente album, A NINGÚN HOMBRE (Cap.11: Poder), that didn’t have a video… a full-circle homage to Lorca, to flamenco, to Rosalía, to the power of artistry untethered and breaking the binds that imprison us.
Untethered by the conservatism of tradition. Untethered by the gatekeeping of the old system. Untethered by fear.
You can watch it here. Enjoy.
As I continue to explore these tools that have unlocked stories for so many of us, I’m reminded of that night in 2017, when I first heard a voice that felt like the future.