1.5 Billion Views and Counting
Before you understand what Pasqual Gutiérrez and Raúl "RJ" Sanchez are trying to do, you need to understand what they have already done. The directing duo known as CLIQUA has amassed over 1.5 billion YouTube views. They directed The Weeknd's "Save Your Tears" — the most-watched video from the After Hours era, with over two billion views. They directed "Take My Breath," "Sacrifice," "Out of Time," and "Popular." They directed J Balvin's "Reggaeton," the video that launched their career. They directed Rosalía's "Yo x Ti, Tu x Mi." They directed Travis Scott's "K-Pop" featuring Bad Bunny and The Weeknd, the first video from Utopia.
They did all of this in roughly six years, starting from zero, as two Mexican-American directors from Los Angeles who began by shooting videos for a rapper one of their sisters was dating.
This is the kind of résumé that gets you called a music video director and kept there. CLIQUA refused to stay.
Where They Came From
Gutiérrez grew up between East Los Angeles and Pomona, fifth of five siblings, shaped by a brother who was simultaneously a gang member and a cinephile — someone who took him to arthouse theaters and made him watch Amélie and Blood In Blood Out in the same week. He studied film production at Chapman University on loans his father took out without hesitation, because no one had ever asked his father what he wanted to do with his life and he wasn't going to do the same to his son.
Sanchez graduated from UC Berkeley in ancient history, intending to go to law school, and returned to Los Angeles instead to make videos with a rapper his sister was seeing. His first language was Spanish. His references were corridos and Los Tigres del Norte. He learned cinema through video games and elective film studies courses.
They met through their then-girlfriends — now wives, now mothers of their respective children — and bonded over a shared question: what does it mean to navigate this industry as a Latino? That question became the foundation of CLIQUA. The name comes from the book Varrio by Gusmano Cesaretti, an Italian photographer who documented East L.A. lowrider culture in the 1970s.
The Language They Speak
What made CLIQUA different from the start was not technical skill, though that was always present. It was the insistence on thinking in film. "The language we have always used to even talk about music videos has always been film-centric," Sanchez has said. "Those are the influences. We speak in movies."
That orientation shows. The Weeknd's Dawn FM era videos — Sacrifice, Out of Time, Is There Someone Else? — constructed a coherent dystopian narrative world across multiple releases. They weren't standalone clips. They were episodes. No one asked CLIQUA to do that. They decided it was the right thing and built it.
The scale of their commercial work sits alongside a genuine investment in aesthetics that goes beyond the brief. Their videos for Latin artists in the reggaeton era helped reshape what global pop looked like. They were early, they were precise, and they stayed.
The Turn Toward Film
In 2023, CLIQUA released their first narrative short, Shut Up and Fish — a film about four Edgars (young Latino men with bowl cuts) on a boat, constructed deliberately to feel like a Bergman film, because Gutiérrez and Sanchez had never seen that combination and wanted to make it exist. The short won the top prize at the Sun Valley Film Festival, Best Narrative Short at the Atlanta Film Festival and the NY Latino Film Festival, and an honorable mention at Hollyshorts in Los Angeles.
Then Gutiérrez went further. Serious People, co-directed with longtime friend Ben Mullinkosson, premiered at Sundance in 2025. It is a docufiction hybrid — a cringe comedy about a music video director who hires a doppelganger so he can be present for the birth of his child while still honoring professional commitments. It is autobiographical. Gutiérrez and Sanchez play versions of themselves. The anxiety at the center of the film is real: the industry does not accommodate human life, and the people inside it are not supposed to say so.
The film had a theatrical release in November 2025 and is now on VOD. Its references — Roy Andersson's vignettes, Jonathan Glazer's surveillance aesthetic in The Zone of Interest — are flagged deliberately by Gutiérrez in every Q&A. He wants the audience to follow those threads. He is using the film's platform to make arthouse cinema accessible to people who have never heard those names.
What Comes Next
CLIQUA is developing Golden Boy — a feature they describe as a Stand by Me-type story about four Edgars who believe one of them is the long-lost son of Oscar De La Hoya. They journey across California to find out. It is funny and specific and rooted in a version of Los Angeles that rarely appears in American cinema.
Both Gutiérrez and Sanchez became fathers in the window around Serious People. Both are more committed to long-form work than they have ever been. Music videos remain on the table — their relationship with The Weeknd is ongoing, and their commercial work continues — but the trajectory is clear.
They started in a community of Latin American artists that no major outlet was paying attention to. They built a body of work that became unavoidable. Now they are making the films they always said they would make, in the only language they have ever spoken.
The century's biggest music videos were, it turns out, a long warm-up.
