Landfall

After the fallout of Hurricane Maria and an economic crisis, Puerto Ricans prepare to weather a threat of global significance: disaster capitalism.

Nuns on a cliff at Cueva del Indio, Puerto Rico
Series
POV
Premiere Date
July 12, 2021
Length
83 minutes
Funding Initiative
Open Call
  • Award laurels-r Created with Sketch.
    2020 DOC NYC - New York Documentary Festival-Grand Jury Prize
  • Nominated laurels-r Created with Sketch.
    2020 Independent Spirit Awards-Truer Than Fiction Award
    • filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo
    Producer/Director

    Cecilia Aldarondo

    Cecilia Aldarondo is a documentary director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who makes films at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her feature documentary Memories of a Penitent Heart (Tribeca 2016) had its World Premiere at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on POV in 2017. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2017 Women at Sundance Fellow, two-time MacDowell Colony Fellow, and recipient of a 2019 Bogliasco Foundation Residency. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC's 40 Under 40 list and is one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film for 2015. She teaches at Williams College.

    Other ITVS Films
    Memories of a Penitent Heart
    Producer

    Ines Hofmann Kanna

    Ines Hofmann Kanna is an independent producer with more than twenty years of experience. Her credits include Sonia Kennebeck’s Emmy-nominated National Bird (Berlin 2016) and Kennebeck’s most recent film, Enemies of the State (Tribeca 2020). She was also a consulting producer on Cecilia Aldarondo’s award-winning debut Memories of a Penitent Heart (Tribeca… Show more 2016). She began her career at Boston’s PBS station, WGBH, and has filmed in places as close as Iowa and as far as Yemen and Saudi Arabia. She also worked as Supervising Producer for ITVS, where she guided more than thirty filmmakers from production to broadcast. Show less

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    The Film

    After the landfall of Hurricane María in 2017, Puerto Rico grapples with a devastated infrastructure and multi-billion dollar debt as outside investors descend—not to bail out communities, but to cash in. Set against the backdrop of protests that toppled the US colony’s governor in 2019, Landfall shares kaleidoscopic glimpses of collective trauma and resistance. Everyday puertorriqueños—subsistence farmers, teachers, activists, and more—meet an incoming wave of cryptocurrency traders, luxury real estate developers, and the politicians leveraging the crisis to recruit their extractive business ventures. In the midst of it all daily life goes on. The next generation of Puerto Ricans find themselves at an inflection point between the dream of a socialist utopia and the reality of recolonization. The new Puerto Rico poses a question of global urgency: when the world falls apart, what does a just recovery look like?

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