THERE'S NO PLACE
THERE'S NO PLACE is a road trip dramedy about two Mexican-American brothers and a long drive down the Northern California coast. Juan picks Junior up at Pelican Bay State Prison after fifteen years inside, and they head south toward their mother's apartment in San Jose — a trip that should take a day but ends up taking three. Juan is twenty-seven, a self-taught techie hustling contract work at the edge of a tech industry that won't quite let him in. Junior is thirty-seven, and coming home to a Bay Area where the wealth has multiplied and the people it left out have been pushed further to the edges. The film is rough around the edges and funny the way real trouble is funny — the comedy comes out of discomfort and everyday absurdity, and so do the moments where the brothers actually reach each other. The title works two ways: there's no place for us, and there's no place like home.
The film is the debut feature of writer-director Jesus Beltran. Jesus has spent twenty-plus years in the Bay Area, first earning a mechanical engineering degree at Stanford, then working in tech while building a filmmaking career. He approaches both the same way: figure out how something works, then build it. His four short films include The Grass Grows Green, which played Sundance and SXSW, and MOTOS, which just completed its national festival run and received coverage in MovieMaker Magazine. THERE'S NO PLACE was one of five finalists out of more than a thousand submissions for 2026 AT&T/Tribeca Untold Stories, and a Sundance Producers Lab finalist.
THERE’S NO PLACE is a Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) fiscally sponsored project. Contributions through BAVC are tax-deductible.
To support the project: https://www.bavc.org/fiscal_project/theres-no-place/
For other inquiries: jb@zumpangofilms.com
2026 ATT Tribeca Untold Stories - Video Pitch
There’s No Place - Project Lookbook
