Landfall: An Atypical Documentary on the Aftermath of Hurricane Maria

Filmmaker Cecilia Aldarando creates a film using a collection of vignettes of everyday life in Puerto Rico, post Hurricane Maria. Unlike most documentaries, Aldarando trades discourse for visuals. Though it paints a picture of several towns across the country and their post-Maria state, I’m just not convinced that “mostly visuals” communicates the story the filmmaker intended.

“They’ll Never See Us As Equals”

Despite being US citizens since 1917, Puerto Ricans still do not enjoy the same rights as US citizens.

Hurricane Maria, considered the worst natural disaster to hit Puerto Rico, St. Croix and Dominica in the past century, roared into Puerto Rico in September 2017. Puerto Rico was already $74 million in debt before this Category 5 storm hit.

The Obama administration attempted to address the debt installing a taskforce known as “La Junta” in 2016. The taskforce looked for ways to cut hundreds of millions of Puerto Rico’s debt, yet the budgeting ended up hitting Maria’s victims the hardest. They were left with no roads, bridges or helicopters to reach isolated people.

As has been widely broadcast in the past, the Trump administration did practically nothing for the widespread devastation and Trump himself was quoted to say that Hurricane Katrina was a “real disaster” in comparison. He was seen throwing rolls of paper towels, in Trumpian “let them eat cake” style, to desperate residents who had no electricity or clean water.

Trump was also reported to have stated that he wanted to exchange Greenland for Puerto Rico because Puerto Rico “was dirty and the people were poor”. And of course we can’t forget Trump’s numerous tweets scapegoating both Puerto Rico and the Democrats for Maria’s devastation and for making him look bad. Roughly 3000 people died due to the lack of the federal and local government’s response, yet he did nothing but deny it.

Source : Mandel Ngan-Getty Images

It wasn’t until January 2020, after terrible earthquakes and aftershocks created more devastation, that Trump declared Puerto Rico a disaster and approved the release of funds to aid them.

Couple that with widespread corruption throughout the Puerto Rican government and you’ve got the making of a revolution.

Aftermath

The film strays from the usual informational approach, supposedly to create a more intimate portrait of the people across the country. We see several different kinds of people from old to young, rural to urban, living in the altered landscape.

Elisa, one of the featured citizens, managed to rally her community to take over a local abandoned school for those in her town who were stranded and left homeless. The group cleaned up the school and used the kitchen and it’s classrooms as a “community living experiment” to house and feed those affected.

As can be expected, not all of the recovery efforts were benign. The film shifts our focus to the greed vultures that descended upon the ruins to take advantage of the devastated. Cryptocurrency millionaires, taking full advantage of the lack of taxes on new businesses there, swooped in to attempt to build brand new neighborhoods and make the locals believe they were there to help them.

Source: Blackscrackle Films

The Puerto Rican government was all too keen to cash in and allow these predators in. Widespread riots by the people ensued and after only 12 days, they managed to oust then Governor, Ricardo Rossello.

The fight didn’t end there though. The current governor Wanda Vazquez, who publicly endorsed Trump’s re-election, is also being set to task over corruption and withholding needed supplies, left to rot in a warehouse, meant for victims of the numerous natural disasters there.

In All Honesty…

I have very mixed feelings about this film.

Aldarando set out to create “poetic sensibility to documentary film”. Using moving images of a handful of different lives, Landmark “examines a ruined world at the brink of transformation, spinning a cautionary tale for our times.”

Aldarando definitely created a unique documentary, one vastly far from my expectations. This is unlike any documentary I’ve seen, but that isn’t always a good thing. A lot of what was filmed seemed irrelevant, making the pacing slow and leaving me confused about the actual point she was trying to get across.

I was hoping to be informed more. I was excited to learn, from the eyes of the people who live there, how the US’s lack of action and the corruption of their own government affected the people. Instead, I was left to make a lot of my own assumptions based on a lot of inconsistent, baffling imagery.

Source: Blackscrackle Films

If it weren’t for the press notes that I had available to me, I would not have understood much of what Aldarando was going for. There were a lot of extraneous, unnecessary scenes that didn’t seem to fit. Perhaps there was meaning for her, but it didn’t quite translate on screen, which makes me wonder if it will translate to her audiences.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad film and definitely has a place in history as one to watch and learn from. I guess I was just hoping for more straightforward knowledge from the people’s themselves. I wanted to hear about their struggles in a clearly defined, personal, well-planned tale.

I do believe Aldarando accomplished what she set out to create. Just know that, as a viewer, you will not get from Landfall what you get from most documentaries. It’s not traditionally set up but it definitely communicates. It’s energy radiates the tensions extending from the hearts of a thoroughly mistreated people who defy the victim label handed to them by colonialism, racism and greed.

Overall though, it’s a portrait of resilience, pride and survival. It is a rallying cry against corruption and greed. It is a testament of the human spirit that, eventually, will overcome the darkness that holds us down on a daily basis. One of the quotes featured in the film says it all:

“It was (became) the hurricane we had trapped in our chests”.