CLOSURE: Central Library will be closed Tuesday, July 21, through Saturday, July 25, while emergency repairs are made to the building’s cooling system. We expect to reopen Monday, July 27. Click for more details on holds, program schedules, and returns during the closure. 

eVideo Kanopy

Landfall

Summary

Through shard-like glimpses of everyday life in post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico, LANDFALL (dir. Cecilia Aldarondo) traces collective trauma and resistance in the wake of the devastating storm and exposes the island’s fraught colonial relationship with the United States. The world measured the historic hurricane in wind speeds and flood levels. But when the grid collapsed and relief stalled, it became clear that María had struck an island already in crisis, plagued by years of recession and a spiraling public debt that crippled the economy. As federal aid faltered, a new wave of investors arrived, revealing how Puerto Rico’s crisis also created opportunity for those who might seek to exploit it. Cryptocurrency entrepreneurs and other investors, drawn to favorable tax policies, came in search of profit.Shaped from within the communities it portrays, LANDFALL moves between intimate conversations and public protests, capturing confrontations that echo the island’s colonial past and its neocolonial present. Refusing both spectacle and sentimentality, LANDFALL centers the strength and solidarity of those rebuilding, revealing that catastrophe does not create crisis so much as expose the structures that sustain it. Through luminous and carefully composed images, the camera inverts a postcard perfect image of the island with its careful attention to place and people. Rather than reducing Puerto Rico to either ruin or paradise, it centers those navigating its present. In doing so, it asks a question that resonates far beyond Puerto Rico: when disaster strikes, who is protected, who profits, and who is left to rebuild?

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