Following its Recent Tribeca Festival Engagement, Cecilia Aldarondo’s Independent Spirit Award-Nominated Film LANDFALL Heads to POV. An Examination of Post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico, the Documentary Premieres on Monday, July 12, 2021 on PBS.
Watch the trailer at https://www.pbs.org/pov/watch/landfall/video-trailer-landfall/.
American Documentary | POV is proud to announce the national broadcast premiere of Landfall, the second film to show on POV’s 34th season. Director Cecilia Aldarondo’s latest feature documentary, which was produced by Ines Hofmann Kanna, will premiere Monday July 12, 2021 on PBSat 10 p.m. ET (check local listings) and at pov.org. The film will also be available to stream for free at pov.org until August 11, 2021. Aldarondo was a 2021 Independent Spirit Award “Truer than Fiction” nominee. The award recognizes outstanding emerging talent in nonfiction film direction.
An official selection of the Tribeca Film Festival and winner of the Viewfinders Grand Jury at 2020 DOC NYC, Landfall is Aldarondo’s second documentary film to broadcast on POV after her Season 30 title, Memories of a Penitent Heart. Offering a prismatic portrait of collective trauma and resistance and set against the backdrop of the 2019 protests in the wake of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico that toppled the governor, the film assembles scenes from all over the island, spotlighting the different ways each community addresses its own recovery.
Landfall speaks to the often competing visions of post-María Puerto Rico’s future. Foregrounding the 72-billion-dollar debt crisis that predated the storm and worsened its impact, Aldarondo’s film explores the intertwining legacies of colonialism, exploitative industries and disaster capitalism and the barriers to recovery they create. As opportunists looking to make a profit descend upon the island, the Puerto Rican diaspora comes together to create unprecedented forms of community-led mutual aid when assistance from the federal government and traditional NGOs fails to appear.
“As a Puerto Rican from the diaspora, I watched Hurricane María unfold from afar while cut off from loved ones, including my grandmother who would die six months after the storm. Reeling from the debt crisis, which unleashed a wave of austerity, poverty and migration that María only intensified, the Puerto Rico depicted in Landfall is a laboratory for greed, privatization, gentrification, the dismantling of social services, and the devastating effects of climate change,” said director Cecilia Aldarondo. She continued, “We may have a new President and Puerto Rico a new governor, but little has changed since María hit, as evidenced by the recent privatization of Puerto Rico’s electric grid. The Puerto Rican people are still fighting to end the profit-driven policies that have proved disastrous ever since President Obama signed them into existence. In Landfall I wanted to balance a cautionary tale for our times, while also prioritizing a dignified image of Puerto Ricans who have banded together to fight for their sovereignty.”
“It was an absolute privilege to support Cecilia on this remarkable project. Her collaboration with Puerto Rico-based activist Lale Namerrow Pastor was a model of Puerto Rican solidarity, from the colony to the diaspora. By combining considerate and equitable filmmaking with artistic storytelling that challenges what is currently expected of documentaries, Landfall is setting the bar for our field,” said producer Ines Hofmann Kanna.
As activists flood the streets to protest government corruption, Landfall finds an archipelago on the brink. While the future remains uncertain, Aldarondo captures the communal power of people fighting for autonomy over their lives. In posing the question of how we move forward in the wake of disaster, the celebratory mood in the streets offers the beginnings of an answer, one emerging from a growing demand for self-determination and a collective spirit.
“Cecilia’s masterpiece is both a sharp condemnation of the continued colonial exploitation of Puerto Rico and a warm embrace of the land and people. Rendered with a singular vision and deep affection, you’ll be swept into solidarity with these Puerto Ricans who resist and rebuild,” said Chris White, executive producer, POV.
Landfall is a co-production of POV and ITVS, in association with Latino Public Broadcasting.
LANDFALL. USA, 94 min. In Spanish and English with English subtitles. Director/Producer: Cecilia Aldarondo; Producer: Ines Hofmann Kanna; Collaborator/Associate Producer: Lale Namerrow Pastor ; Editor: Terra Jean Long; Cinematographer: Pablo Álvarez-Mesa; Composer: Angélica Negrón; Impact Producer: Ana Portnoy Brimmer; Executive Producers: Charlotte Cook, Laura Poitras; Executive Producers for POV: Erika Dilday, Justine Nagan, and Chris White; Executive Producer for ITVS: Sally Jo Fifer; Executive Producer for LPB: Sandie Viquez Pedlow.
About the Creative Team:
Cecilia Aldarondo (she/her) is a documentary director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who works at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her feature documentaries Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016) and Landfall (2020) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the award-winning PBS series POV. Landfall‘s many awards include the 2020 DOC NYC Film Festival Viewfinders Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, as well as Cinema Eye and Film Independent Spirit Award nominations. Among Aldarondo’s fellowships and honors are the Guggenheim, a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the 2021 New America Fellowship, and Women at Sundance 2017. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list and is one of 2015’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She teaches at Williams College.
Ines Hofmann Kanna – Producer
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 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.
Lale Namerrow Pastor – Associate Producer and CollaboratorLale Namerrow Pastor is a queer, transfeminist person. Born in Rió Piedras, Puerto Rico to a Dominican mother and absent father. They completed undergraduate studies in Photography and Art History at the University of Puerto and continued academic studies in Film Production and Direction at the New York Film Academy in New York City. Lale currently resides in Puerto Rico, where they are a musical curator in the subversive queer scene, archival researcher, audio visual producer and video editor. Among so much, they are Caribbean, activist, videographer, advisor, compañere, turba, and possibly everything that fits between those labels.
About POV
Produced by American Documentary, POV is the longest-running independent documentary showcase on American television. Since 1988, POV has presented films on PBS that capture the full spectrum of the human experience, with a long commitment to centering women and people of color in front of, and behind, the camera. The series is known for introducing generations of viewers to groundbreaking works like Tongues Untied, American Promise and Minding The Gap and innovative filmmakers including Jonathan Demme, Laura Poitras and Nanfu Wang. In 2018, POV Shorts launched as one of the first PBS series dedicated to bold and timely short-form documentaries. All POV programs are broadcast nationally on PBS, POV.org and the PBS Video app.
POV goes “beyond the broadcast” to bring powerful nonfiction storytelling to viewers wherever they are. Free educational resources accompany every film and a community network of thousands of partners nationwide work with POV to spark dialogue around today’s most pressing issues. POV continues to explore the future of documentary through innovative productions with partners such as The New York Times and The National Film Board of Canada and on platforms including Snapchat and Instagram.
POV films and projects have won 42 Emmy Awards, 25 George Foster Peabody Awards, 14 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three Academy Awards and the first-ever George Polk Documentary Film Award. Learn more at pbs.org/pov and follow @povdocs on social media.
About American Documentary, Inc.
American Documentary, Inc. (AmDoc) is a multimedia company dedicated to creating, identifying and presenting contemporary stories that express opinions and perspectives rarely featured in mainstream media outlets. AmDoc is a catalyst for public culture, developing collaborative strategic engagement activities around socially relevant content on television, online and in community settings. These activities are designed to trigger action, from dialogue and feedback to educational opportunities and community participation.
Major funding for POV is provided by PBS, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Wyncote Foundation, Reva & David Logan Foundation, Open Society Foundations, Perspective Fund and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding comes from Nancy Blachman and David desJardins, Bertha Foundation, The Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Charitable Trust, Park Foundation, Sage Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Chris and Nancy Plaut, Abby Pucker, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee and public telev
