LandfallDirected by CeciliaAldarondo, 2020, 91 minutes, color. Distributed by Good Docs, www.gooddocs.net
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: When does crisis begin and end?In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, US news media issued urgent reports of Puerto Rico's widespread devastation and exigent federal aid response.In the course of a year, these accounts quickly gave way to subdued predictions that conditions of emergency were "the new normal" for the island territory (CBS News, 2018).Such fleeting depictions frame environmental catastrophe as an isolated incident, detached from inciting structures of coloniality.Cecilia Aldarondo's 2020 documentary Landfall offers a critical rejoinder to these singular narratives of disaster (Figure 1).Filmed in Puerto Rico during the two years following Maria, Landfall provides a portrait of events that ultimately led former Governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign in 2019.Here, the aftermath of disaster prompted one of the largest grassroot movements in Puerto Rico's history.Through the stories of Puerto Rican community organizers, farmers, hurricane survivors, and long-term residents, as well as those of tech CEO Brock Pierce, luxury real estate developers, and venture capitalists from the mainland United States, the film explores competing trajectories of recovery as imagined and enacted by these disparate actors.Aldarondo's conceptual approach to visualizing and narrating experiences of disaster directs attention to the everyday lives of Puerto Rican people as they cope with uncertainty while advocating for their own visions of futurity.Through affective, sensorial, and nonlinear ethnographic storytelling, Landfall advocates for a radical reimagination of recovery frameworks.It is an effort to return agency and self-determination to those affected by environmental catastrophe through protected rights to land, livelihood, public welfare, and independent governance.While mainstream media narratives often situate conditions of displacement and destruction as temporally bounded, direct outcomes of a single disaster event, Hurricane Maria was one of many crises in Puerto Rico's history (Bonilla, 2020, 2-3).Complicating the unitary framing of natural disaster discourse, Landfall follows Puerto Rican activists and community members as they contest the destructive forces of capitalism, colonialism, and climate change.Weaving together scenes of protests opposing welfare cuts under the Obamaappointed Junta administration with archival footage of US military operations, Landfall collapses temporal distinctions between the past and present dispossessions that contribute to Puerto Rico's long-term state of emergency.Aldarondo juxtaposes archival advertisements that brand Puerto Rico as a vacation paradise with present-day images of American tourists who pose besides Spanish conquistador statues.Shots of new luxury resorts interpose residents' oral histories to accentuate the causes of their forced displacement.Through this CRITIQUE through her affective and intimate illustrations of participants' ties to place and community, Aldarondo centers Puerto Rican autonomy as the key to successful reparation.In an unwavering rejection of the dehumanizing complacency that characterizes U.S. governmentality of the island territory, Landfall brings Puerto Ricans' calls for accountability into relational proximity with those responsible for their ongoing dispossession.It thus offers an important contribution to conversations surrounding the political economy of disaster, humanitarian aid and recovery planning, and modern-day US colonialism.
Source: Visual Anthropology Review
DOI: 10.1111/var.70020
Author: Lauren Ruhnke
Institution: Temple University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7117007938