Directed by Cecilia Aldarondo • 2020 • Puerto Rico
An intimate and lyrical portrait of trauma, resilience, and resistance in post–Hurricane María Puerto Rico, LANDFALL traces collective recovery in the wake of the devastating storm while exposing the island’s deepening economic and environmental crises and its fraught colonial relationship with the United States. Moving between intimate conversations and public protests, Cecilia Aldarondo’s documentary reveals how catastrophe laid bare existing structures of inequality as investors arrived in search of profit. 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.
Up Next in BlackStar Film Festival Presents
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Fire Through Dry Grass
Directed by Andres “Jay” Molina and Alexis Neophytides • 2023 • United States
FIRE THROUGH DRY GRASS tracks the devastation experienced by residents of a New York City nursing home during the coronavirus pandemic. Centered on Jay and the Reality Poets, largely a group of gun-violence survivors, ...
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The Changing Same
Directed by Cauleen Smith • 2001 • United States
In this experimental hybrid between science fiction and noir, Cauleen Smith explores Black alienation and outsiderhood via the story of two aliens stationed on Earth searching for kinship and a sense of purpose.
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An Ecstatic Experience
Directed by Ja’Tovia Gary • 2015 • United States
Employing intricately hand-altered archival footage of Black women speaking on the push for liberation and freedom, director Ja’Tovia Gary crafts a meditative invocation of transcendence as a means of restoration.
