CLIQUE
**CLIQUE** is a short film about a young Chicano who believes that entering the neighborhood clique will finally give his life meaning — respect, identity, family. Told through two parallel timelines, the film intercuts his brutal initiation, where he is beaten and left sprawled on the pavement, with a robbery he commits alongside the same clique years later. The images mirror each other with fatal precision: in the first fall, he survives; in the second, he does not. What once felt like a rite of passage reveals itself as a quiet sentence. As the group steals a truck, something far less visible is being taken in return — his future, his time, his breath. *Clique* does not romanticize violence; it examines the seduction of belonging and the cost of mistaking it for destiny, exposing how a dream of acceptance can narrow into inevitability.