When the Screen Becomes a Mirror: A New Film Exposes the Wounds of an Island
Scene from the film “La Pecera.” The story follows a Puerto Rican artist living in San Juan who learns about her cancer and decides to return to her birthplace of Vieques. Image courtesy of Monument Releasing
“La Pecera” blends personal tragedy with political defiance, sparking a movement — and a new wave of Puerto Rican cinema led by women.
Haz clic aquí para leer este reportaje en español.
At an arthouse theater in Santa Monica, Calif., a small crowd gathers for a Sunday morning screening of “La Pecera.” The Puerto Rican independent film explores a cancer patient’s end-of-life decision in the context of Vieques, the small island municipality contaminated by decades of U.S. Navy occupation. At the end of the screening, director Glorimar Marrero Sánchez and star Isel Rodríguez take questions from the audience.
Halfway through the Q&A session, a man is moved to tears as he struggles to explain that he is a cancer survivor. He thanks the filmmakers for their sensitivity in dealing with the subject matter and, gaining composure, asks – has the movie done anything to accelerate the cleanup of Vieques’ toxic waters?
“That’s part of the conversation,” responds the director, who also wrote and co-produced the film. “And that’s part of our journey here.”
“La Pecera” (“The Fishbowl”) tells the story of Noelia, a Puerto Rican multimedia artist living in the capital city of San Juan who learns that her colon cancer has metastasized and, refusing conventional treatment, decides to return to her birthplace of Vieques, a Caribbean island eight miles off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast and likely the source of her illness. Impeccably played by Rodríguez, Noelia reconnects with her roots in Vieques and the small island’s ongoing campaign to clean up the toxic mess left by the Navy.
Film poster for “La Pecera.” Image courtesy of Monument Releasing
For 60 years, the U.S. Navy occupied nearly three-quarters of the small island and used it as a bombing range, experimenting with dangerous biochemical agents. The military abandoned Vieques in 2003, leaving behind not only a contaminated environment but thousands of live munitions underground and in the water.
Today, about half of the island is closed off to residents. According to the Puerto Rico Cancer Registry, Vieques and the neighboring island of Culebra have the highest cancer mortality rate in the archipelago. A study by Puerto Rico’s Department of Health found that Viequenses had a 27% higher rate of cancer than other Puerto Ricans. while other studies have found a 280% higher rate of lung cancer among its women.
These studies suggest –and Vieques residents believe – that the higher rates are a result of the Navy occupation. While the U.S. Navy has acknowledged the environmental contamination, there has been an ongoing debate about the health impact and any specific link between the Navy’s activities and the high cancer rates.
Glorimar Marrero Sánchez during the filming of “La Pecera” in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Photo by Thais Llorca, courtesy of Monument Releasing
The journey Marrero alluded to at the screening began in March, when “La Pecera” embarked on a national tour that took the low-budget, Spanish-language film to more than 20 theaters in a dozen states, including several belonging to the powerhouse AMC chain. Capping out its theatrical release with a one-night showing at Chicago’s famed Music Box theater in May, La Pecera is now set to begin streaming June 4 on Amazon, Apple TV+, and Vimeo.
Ryan Kampe, a spokesperson for distributor Monument Releasing, said that this type of “targeted” release is increasingly rare in the industry and that creating “events” around the screenings helped promote the film.
“We had to lean into a word-of-mouth audience with a target on the Puerto Rican community, the wider Latin community and arthouse audiences,” Kampe said. “Given the story, there was a focus on a female audience, women who may connect to the protagonist's story. Q&As and community support have been key in driving interest.”
Its theatrical release is one of several firsts for a Puerto Rican film. It was the first boricua movie to premiere in the World Dramatic competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2023, and a year later was the first to earn a nomination for Spain’s prestigious Goya Award, for best Iberoamerican Film. It broke box office records in Puerto Rico, staying in theaters for 32 weeks.
The film has two Spanish co-producers, and a significant portion of its funding came from private and public institutions in Spain. With a budget of less than $1 million, “La Pecera” may signal a new era for Puerto Rico’s struggling film industry – one in which women filmmakers appear to be taking the lead.
For first-time feature director Marrero, the “La Pecera” journey actually started over a decade ago, in 2013, when she began developing the script. Born and raised in the mountain town of Barranquitas in Puerto Rico, she was initially inspired by her own mother, who succumbed to colorectal cancer.
“My first intention was to work with a female character with that terminal disease,” Marrero said in an interview with palabra. “The weight borne by a character with the same disease but who took other decisions and another path is what jump-started the first version of the script.”
Puerto Rican writer and director Glorimar Marrero Sánchez. Photo courtesy of Monument Releasing
Because the subject matter was so close to her heart, Marrero didn’t want the story to be too autobiographical and declined to set it in Barranquitas. Like most Puerto Ricans living in the Caribbean archipelago, she was familiar with the decades-long fight against the Navy occupation in Vieques and the small island’s high cancer rates.
Marrero soon found a way to connect her character with the small island’s environment.
“For me, it was important to address the symptoms of colonialism, as well as the symptoms of a terminal disease,” Marrero explained. She said she wanted to show Vieques as “a colony within a colony, a terrible place created by that political relationship, a lack of attention that produces illnesses and has an important environmental impact.”
Support the voices of independent journalists.
|
Getting the film financed and produced took years of strategic competition and thousands of travel miles. Marrero first submitted her script to the New Latin American Film Festival in Havana, Cuba, where it won the Coral award for Best Unpublished Screenplay in 2017. That allowed her to tap into the Tribeca Film Institute Latin American Fund’s development resources.
She was one of the last Puerto Rican filmmakers to receive a $250,000 grant from the Puerto Rico Film Corporation before the program ended. In 2018, she took her project to the Málaga (Spain) Film Festival’s Industry Zone (MAFIZ), where she won the European Audiovisual Entrepreneurs (EAVE) award and met the first of her two Spanish co-producers. A year later, she struck a co-production deal with them at the Ventana Sur international forum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which allowed her to qualify for $90,000 from Ibermedia, a European program that supports co-productions involving Spain, Portugal, and Latin America.
With additional Spanish and Puerto Rican funds, Marrero and her Puerto Rican-Spanish crew and largely Puerto Rican cast began production in 2021, working on an isolated “bubble” because of COVID.
“It was a small team, which provided much intimacy, much support, and much harmony,” Marrero recalled. That was especially important for the actors, especially the one playing the main character, who carries most of the film’s huge emotional burden.
Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, center, on set for “La Pecera” in Manatí, Puerto Rico, December 12, 2021. Photo by Laura Magruder, courtesy of Monument Releasing
Rodríguez, an actress well known in Puerto Rico for comedic stage roles, said that getting into the character of Noelia took a lot of research and long conversations with Marrero.
“Conversations about the script, conversations about the disease from her perspective, from what she lived with her mom,” Rodríguez told palabra. “Conversations with women who have gone through this disease, who live with a colostomy bag.”
One topic that emerged, Rodríguez recalled, was the need for self-determination. “Of one’s autonomy as a human being, of being able to do with your body what you want to do and when you want to do it. A sort of need for autonomy, of liberty … a feeling of power and of belonging to oneself. A cry for self-determination, she and Marrero agreed, that parallels that of Vieques and Puerto Rico.
The Sundance premiere in 2023 and the Goya nod in 2024 have been key to the film’s apparent commercial success. At the festival in Park City, Utah, producers signed with an international sales agent, Visit Films. The publicity that came from the nomination allowed the film to stretch its run in Puerto Rico movie houses. The U.S. mainland distribution deal was reached this year with Monument, a sister company to Visit.
“One of the biggest struggles for Puerto Rican films is usually finding a distributor,” said Naida García Crespo, an independent researcher who writes about Puerto Rican cinema. “The fact that they were able to find a distributor from the get-go, really, really helped them. And also, the movie is good.”
From left: Producer José Esteban Alenda, lead character Isel Rodríguez, director and producer Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, and producer Amaya Izquierdo of “La Pecera” at the Sundance premiere in 2023. Photo courtesy of Monument Releasing
While Monument would not provide box office numbers, Kampe said that licensing the rights to streaming channels was essential to getting the theatrical run. “Without that, it’s hard for a company to risk the costs of release.”
As part of the U.S. theatrical release,”La Pecera” returned to island theaters for a two-week run this spring. At the time, there were two other Puerto Rican films written and directed by women competing at the box office.
“There’s a bunch of women right now making films, producing, directing, writing, acting,” Rodríguez said. “Movies about strong, interesting women. There’s been some sort of boom.”
“I think a lot of us have been for years looking at what’s happening in the film industry and saying, ‘I can do this better.’ Or at least saying, ‘I can also do this. I don’t have to sit and wait for someone to ask me to do it, I’m going to do it.”
Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, who divides her time between Chicago and San Juan, is already working on her next project under a new co-production deal with her two Spanish partners. “El Grito de la Trinitaria” will focus on another female central character, this time a Dominican immigrant in Madrid. Still in the development phase, the director hopes the film will further explore issues of self-determination, this time in the context of displacement and immigration.
A scene from “La Pecera.” Director Glorimar Marrero Sánchez highlights the ongoing health crisis in Vieques, where contamination left by the U.S. Navy continues to harm Puerto Rican communities. Image courtesy of Monument Releasing
Even as “La Pecera” moves into streaming, Marrero hopes to continue screening her debut feature film at festivals and other forums, including universities, where she often takes probing questions from the audience.
“I would love it if this film generates the conversation needed to identify the funds that Vieques needs, the work plan that needs to be designed,” she said, recalling the question from the cancer survivor in Santa Monica.
“I would love it if this film brings attention to the reparations needed by the residents of Vieques, and the direct attention they deserve. I would also like the film to generate a conversation about Puerto Rico’s right to self-determination. Both are important topics, and we need to speak about them.”
—
Antonio Mejías-Rentas is a Puerto Rican bilingual journalist who has lived and worked in Los Angeles for more than 40 years. As a Hispanic Link News Service columnist and entertainment editor at La Opinión for more than two decades, he chronicled the booming U.S. Latino arts and entertainment scene. As managing editor at Boyle Heights Beat for 10 years, he mentored teen journalists and managed the web page for that community news outlet in an East Los Angeles barrio. He is a former NAHJ board member and former NAHJ-LA president. Retired in 2024, he still has some stories to tell. @lataino
Patricia Guadalupe, raised in Puerto Rico, is a bilingual multimedia journalist based in Washington, D.C., and is the interim managing editor of palabra. She has been covering the capital for both English- and Spanish-language media outlets since the mid-1990s and previously worked as a reporter in New York City. She’s been an editor at Hispanic Link News Service, a reporter at WTOP Radio (CBS Washington affiliate), a contributing reporter for CBS Radio network, and has written for NBC News.com and Latino Magazine, among others. She is a graduate of Michigan State University and has a Master’s degree from the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University. She is the former president of the Washington, D.C., chapter of NAHJ and is an adjunct professor at American University in the nation’s capital and the Washington semester program of Florida International University. @PatriciagDC