INTERVIEW: In ‘The Fishbowl,’ Vieques comes into focus
Photo: The Fishbowl stars Isel Rodríguez as a woman returning home to Vieques, Puerto Rico. Photo courtesy of Cinema Tropical / Provided with permission.
Vieques is an island that’s part of Puerto Rico, and for years it was used as a United States military testing ground. A new movie called The Fishbowl, directed by first-time feature filmmaker Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, follows a 40-year-old woman named Noelia (Isel Rodríguez) who is an artist struggling with terminal cancer. In her final days, she decides to speak out against the devastation on Vieques in a last act of resilience, according to press notes.
The Fishbowl is now playing in movie theaters after a successful screening at the Sundance Film Festival two years ago. A streaming release is set for May 21. “After the premiere at Sundance back in 2023, being now in the U.S. theatrical release, it’s simply amazing, and it’s good that we can still have opportunities to share our film with the audience,” said Sánchez, who also wrote the screenplay.
The filmmaker is particularly indebted to Sundance for showcasing the film and creating a buzz around the feature, and she appreciated that the festival chose The Fishbowl to compete in the world dramatic competition, with movies from around the globe, rather than in the U.S. domestic contest.
“It was amazing,” she said. “We were very lucky that the programmers of the Sundance Film Festival, they programmed the film in the world dramatic competition, not under the U.S, which is usually [the] consideration that Puerto Rico normally goes under the U.S., but this is a co-production with Spain. They agreed to program it with the world dramatic competition, which was amazing in terms of being part of a selection of global films, and having Puerto Rico there as a country was very powerful. And also the audience really enjoyed the film, and we had a lot of conversations regarding the situation about Vieques. A lot of people didn’t know about the history of Vieques, so it was a good moment to share conversations regarding Puerto Ricans in the diaspora but also Puerto Ricans in the archipelago of Puerto Rico. So it was very powerful to be able to share the film with filmmakers but also with the general audience because Sundance is a film festival with a good amount of audience that attend films, and the festival also promoted panels, conversations regarding independent filmmaking. So it was a really good moment for us, and being in that selection was a huge step for the film.”
The locations that one sees in The Fishbowl were actually filmed in Vieques, which is a remote island with not too many permanent residents. It was important for Sánchez to have the authenticity of the island featured in the movie, and that could only be achieved with a film shoot that took place within its towns and along its verdant beaches.
“All that you see about Vieques is a natural scenario, except for the house of the mom,” the writer-director said. “That is supposedly in Vieques, but we needed to shoot it on the big island because we couldn’t afford to be that amount of time in Vieques because we need to bring the crew. You have to take everything to Vieques because it’s little resources over there, but, yeah, all the outdoors where she’s walking … and the underwater, all of that is real location in Vieques. We were very lucky.”
Vieques, in many ways, is a stand-in metaphor for the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States, at least that’s how Sánchez sees the island. There is this unbelievable beauty on this tucked-away locale, but because of the military testing, it has suffered environmental issues over the years. Noelia has returned to her home on Vieques to prepare for her final days but also resist the changes she sees in the environment due to colonialism.
“This is a metaphor of our relationship with the United States and Puerto Rico, and it’s the place where you can see the worst victim of that relationship because it’s so huge the contamination there that it’s really a mirror of how this relationship has been very unfair to the Puerto Rican people,” Sánchez said.
It was also important for the filmmaker to depict Noelia in true terms. This character doesn’t actually reveal her cancer diagnosis to loved ones and friends. She would rather keep those matters private, and for Sánchez this was a crucial aspect of the role.
“When I worked on the development of the character, I wanted to work on the sense of the rights that patients have in order to face sickness and to face hard metastases,” she said. “So, for me, it was very important to portray her right to make her own decision. My mother went through that sickness, the colorectal cancer, so for me I kind of listen to her as much as I should because in that situation it’s really hard. So for me it was very important to talk about a character that really has her own rights in her own hands, and she can do the steps that she wants in order to face the end of her life, not necessarily be listening to doctors or seeking regular treatment to extend her life. It was just another sense of: This is it, and this is my right to go back home, even though over there there’s no hospital in Vieques. You can’t get medicine in Vieques sometimes, so for me it was very important to portray that, but also to show the reality of the health system in Vieques.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Fishbowl, written and directed by Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, is now playing in movie theaters. A streaming release is planned for May 21. Click here for more information.
