Margarita Aponte
At the turning point of the Iran-Contra affair, Elena McMahon, a fearless investigative journalist covering the 1984 US presidential campaign, puts herself in danger when she abandons her assigned task in order to fulfill the last wish of her ailing father, a mysterious man whose past activities she barely knows…
Ilia has returned from her graduate studies in Europe to her hometown in the heart of the Puerto Rican mountains: Jayuya. She encounters absurd and bizarre situations with her friends, family, work and romantic life that would only happen in a small rural town.
Mona is a beautiful island, distant, mythical, mysterious, full of caves and legends. It is also unknown. This documentary reveals the history and the fauna of Mona Island, while also audiovisually preserving it.
The story of the basketball players that represented Puerto Rico at the San Juan's 1979 Pan Am Games.
Each one of the 15 lighthouses around the island of Puerto Rico tells the story of the lighthouse keepers, wives or daughters that lived in them. Additional testimonies by architects, historians, biologists and fishermen take us on a trip of beauty, hope, perseverance around them, as we witness the magnificence of its structures and its magical surroundings. Some lighthouses are active, some have been restored, others have been abandoned but all have a unique story to tell.
Amalia is extremely shy, keeping her from socializing with people around her. The music that her neighobr interprets is her way of relaxation. An event brings the threat that the piano will be gone, putting at risk her intimate space of security.
How fair is it for the government to control its citizens? Four Puerto Ricans confront their past when they open their “files”, the records obtained of the illegal surveillance and persecution that the Puerto Rican government held against citizens and organizations that disagreed with the establishment. Through their daily life, they will tell us their stories, experiences and intimate feelings of the persecution they suffered. Taking their past as an example, we will confront the present.
Sammy is a quiet and solitary man who lives from the drug business. The most important things in his life are his younger brother, who he is responsible for, and his horse. This short film reveals daily life at the marginalized spaces in Puerto Rico.
The unpublished correspondence between the great musician Pau Casals, and the Catalan poet Joan Alavedra, and the accounts given by experts, will tell the story behind the creation of The Manger, a musical composition born of a poem by the same title, which became a message for world peace.
Explores the feasibility of the bicycle as a means of transportation in San Juan, Puerto Rico by taking a look at both the dangers faced by the riders and the bicycle's potential as a socializing tool.
The papier-mâché mask is part of the costume used by the vejigante, one of the characters of the Ponce Carnival, which is held every year during the month of February. Don Miguel Caraballo learns as a child to craft these masks. Over the years, he creates his own style and develops a method of meticulous work, achieving the recognition of being called Ponce's best craftsman of masks.
The testimonies of some artists on mural painting in Puerto Rico, as well as art historians and curators, offer multiple perspectives of the mural paintings in different geographical areas of the island.
Rafael Ríos Rey painted more than 40 large murals in Puerto Rico, many of them in important public buildings. This documentary showcases some of his murals, which captured the peasant fiestas, the carnival, the gathering of coffee beans, the sugar cane harvest, the local Ponce traditions, and cockfights.
Isla chatarra describes the phenomenon of the ubiquity of automobiles in Puerto Rico. The island measures slightly less than 9,000 square kilometers, but has 25,000 kilometers of paved road, one of the highest proportions in the planet. Puerto Rico is one of the countries with the largest number of vehicles per kilometer (of road) and third in the world in number of cars per 1,000 inhabitants. The film was produced with the idea to raise consciousness and create a dialogue about the ongoing situation of our dependence on cars. It also shows the dangerous circumstances of an island that is slowly being covered by scrap metal.
Presents three barrio stories: "La familia del Camello" about a public residential basketball coach and his dilemmas, "El baila'o de Julia y Berto" about two neighbors trying to rediscover love in their maturity, and "El rumbón de Fepe" about a man who has to choose between his barrio and the woman he loves.
In 1939, in a French prison camp, José Garcés of the defeated Spanish Republican army raises the spirits of his fellow prisoners by telling the story of the year he was 8 years old, 1911, in a small town in northeastern Spain. He was a rascal, baffling his father, always in trouble, and in love with Valentina, a neighbor girl. On his roof top at night he sends semaphore messages to her. He writes poems. He gets them into trouble, killing her father's breeding pigeons. When the two families camp at a decaying castle, his tutor, a sympathetic priest, tells him about the most valiant men, the saints, the heroes, and the poets. Already a poet, he learns a lesson about being a hero.
