Selected Film
In a gripping and unpredictable 20-year quest, Juan Carlos Rodríguez showcases the poignant story of Vieques. Through intimate recollections, community voices, and archival footage, the film exposes the profound hardships endured by Viequenses before and after the US Navy's departure in 2003. It unveils Vieques' dire health situation throughout the years. Summary: For more than 60 years, the military facilities in the island of Vieques were part of the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Weapon Training Facility (1941-2003), on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. The US Navy and the Marine Corps trained their military forces by simulating war situations that included amphibious landings, naval gunfire, and air-to-ground bombings, some of which were conducted with live explosives. The US Navy occupied 79% of Vieques’s territory, condemning Viequenses to live in a mid-island civilian zone. Hunger, unemployment, military abuses, environmental degradation, and lack of health services came to characterize the life of Viequenses for decades. “Vieques: Living Archive” explores the memory of the Vieques’s social movements against the presence of the US Navy. In 1999, the death of a local security guard, David Sanes, killed by a US Navy bomb dropped near the Camp Garcia observation point, ignited another cycle of civil disobedience in Vieques. As a result of this struggle, on December 3, 1999, President Clinton “ordered a halt to live-fire military training on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques and an end to all exercises there.” Although bombing ended, demilitarization has not resulted in a process of just recovery. While the US Navy finally ended training exercises on the island the land was not transferred to the islanders but to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in 2003. The film highlights the traumatic experiences, solidarity networks, and resistance strategies of the islanders, as well as the ambiguities, conflicts, and challenges among themselves. This documentary examines how a demilitarized community confronts social, economic, and environmental challenges. The film focuses on the environmental and health costs of the US military presence while looking at the dilemmas of post-Navy Vieques. Tensions with the FWS underscore the colonial dilemmas created by federal lands in Vieques. Tourism and gentrification present a threat to the prospects of a community-driven path to sustainable development. The toxic waste of the US Navy has compromised the future, leaving Viequenses with all the uncertainties of an irreversible ecological crisis. Limited access to health services poses a risk for Viequenses, a population with a higher cancer rate than the rest of Puerto Rico. This ecological and public health crisis has been aggravated by the loss of the only hospital after Hurricane Maria, transforming Vieques’ situation into a prolonged disaster. A case-study of military training as slow-violence, the story highlights the problems created by using Vieques as a bombing site, as well as the challenges of cleaning up vast areas of an island polluted with toxic waste. It is an intimate meditation on the paradoxes of war, memory, historical change, and social justice in the 21st Century. The filmmaker and the community develop a closer relationship over the course of the film. The film is a travel documentary divided in three parts, each covering Vieques in three different periods: 1998, 2004, and 2018-2022. Each period portrays the situation of the Vieques people in a very specific context and the overall film represents the evolution of this collective protagonist. The film itself is also conceived as the making of a multilayered archive (personal memories, community dreams, collective action, and internal conflicts), underscoring the role of an audiovisual collection built over two-decades as a living archive of testimonies of the past, present, and future.
Duration: 01:28:30
Country of Origin: United States
Language: Spanish
Director(s): Juan Carlos Rodríguez
Writer(s): Juan Carlos Rodríguez
Producer(s): Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Freddie Marrero-Alfonso, Cynthia Román
Key Cast: The people of Vieques, Juan Carlos Rodríguez
Other Credits: Editor: Arts&Design AMM Loucraft; Graphic Design and Maps: Marcos Menéndez; Drone: Arts&Design AMM Loucraft; Sound Design and Mixing: Rubén Valdés; Music Recording: Harry Aponte; Music: Seba Otero, El Laberinto del Coco, La experiencia de Toñito Cabanillas, Andrés Kino Cruz, Rafael Martínez, Isaías Serrano, Ángel Luis Serrano, Juan Carlos Rodríguez