INTERVIEW: ‘Landfall’ charts Puerto Rico’s journey after the storm
Photo: Landfall, a new documentary from Cecilia Aldarondo, depicts the aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico. Photo courtesy of POV / Provided by Blackscrackle Films with permission.
The new documentary Landfall, directed by Cecilia Aldarondo, offers an impactful portrait of Puerto Rico after the monumental Hurricane María blew through in 2017. In particular, the film focuses on the protests that emerged in 2019 after the failed government response to the major storm. The filmmaker is able to capture communities coming together, under difficult circumstances, in response to the natural disaster and the economic changes that continue to impact the island. The Puerto Rican diaspora, of which Aldarondo is a member, is also featured, with its tireless efforts to provide aid, assistance, and support to family and friends back home.
“Well, it’s personal,” Aldarondo said in a recent phone interview. “I am Puerto Rican. I grew up in the diaspora … I think most people don’t know that more Puerto Ricans live outside of Puerto Rico these days than in Puerto Rico.”
The director, like others in the diaspora community, was literally cut off from family when Hurricane María hit. Her grandmother, who used a wheelchair and needed 24-hour care, lost contact with Aldarondo — an experience the filmmaker called terrifying.
“I had this really terrifying experience of not knowing how she was and not being to get a hold of her,” she said. “Meanwhile, the mainstream media was showing this ticker tape of images of people waiting for aid and suffering and really portraying what I felt was an inaccurate victim narrative about Puerto Ricans in the aftermath of the hurricane, really fixating on the federal government and our president, etc. So there was a lot that I felt the media was missing out on, and meanwhile I was having this personal experience of agonizing over my family. And then my grandmother died about six months after the hurricane, so I count her very much among those who aren’t counted among the dead of this storm.”
Aldarondo said Landfall, which will premiere on PBS’s POV program Monday, July 12 at 10 p.m., is essentially a film born out of emergency and crisis, a visual response based on collective grief and rage. In order to start her project, she needed access to the island, but that was hard to come by in the aftermath of the storm.
“It took a few weeks,” the director said. “There was a period of about a month of real chaos where it was very difficult to get there. I was very conscious of not adding to people’s vulnerability … by showing up and needing a place to stay, so logistically it took us some time. It was a little over a month after the hurricane hit that I was able to get there, and I was very lucky to get initial funding from Field of Vision, which is one of the film’s executive producers. Basically I emailed them, and I said, ‘I really want to make a film about this.’ They said, ‘OK.’ They gave me the resources to go down there, but it took a minute, like so many other things did, to be able to get there.”
What Aldarondo was ultimately able to capture with her lens didn’t surprise her. In Landfall, there are difficult images of struggle and strife, but more often, the director focuses on the resiliency of the community response and the courage of individual residents on the island.
“It didn’t surprise me at all,” she said. “Really what we were only hearing about was the suffering and the images of high drama, and what I wanted to capture was something much more everyday. … The film’s tagline is: ‘When the world falls apart, who do we become?’ That is a sentiment that carries with it potentially some risk and some darkness, but also some opportunity. What I was seeing, what so many people were seeing who were involved in relief efforts in particular, was that there was an extraordinary situation unfolding of people literally springing into action and saving other people. This is a story of what happens when communities take charge of their own fates and act in a spirit of mutual aid. … That’s a very affirming story that I felt was really, really underreported in the media.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Landfall, directed by Cecilia Aldarondo, will premiere on POV on PBS Monday, July 12 at 10 p.m. Click here for more information.
