Esta isla

Bebo, a Puerto Rican kid, makes a living fishing with his brother. Poverty drives them to accept offers to make easy money, until one job ends badly: when faced with the sight of blood, Bebo escapes with Lola, a girl from a good family who is fleeing reality. As they trek across the mountain, the two discover a different, more docile world, that isn’t much like them. What’s left to understand is if redemption is still possible.

COMMENTARY
Cristian Carretero re-elaborates the events he already dealt with in his eponymous short film in 2014 and, sharing the direction with newcomer Lorraine Jones Molina, produces a surprising coming-of-age story, raw and poetic, that illustrates Puerto Rico’s social contradictions using the devices of a noir.

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
From The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz: “The adolescent, however, vacillates between infancy and youth, halting for a moment before the infinite richness of the world… As he leans over the river of his consciousness, he asks himself if the face that appears there, disfigured by the water, is his own… Much the same thing happens to nations and peoples at a certain critical moment in their development. They ask themselves: What are we, and how can we fulfill our obligations to ourselves as we are?”. Puerto Rico is like that. The style of the film embodies it. Filmed in natural light, ours is a tropical realism, heir to Italian realism and Robert Bresson: what is important is not what appears but what is hidden, and no one ever suspects.