The Site of Sites by Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada
Metograph, the independent movie theater in downtown Manhattan, will present the film seres ‘Unraveling Paradise,’ between April 10 and May 1. Curated by Dessane Lopez Cassell, ‘Unraveling Paradise’ presents a selection of Caribbean films and artist’s moving image works that pry apart illusions of the region as a tropical “paradise.” The series features work by Sofía Gallisá Muriente (with the New York premiere of Celaje), Joiri Minaya, Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada, Esther Figueroa, Johanné Gómez Terrero, and Dalissa Montes de Oca (with the US premiere of Pacaman).
There’s a powerful myth that’s been reinforced in the Caribbean for centuries. From early tourism campaigns to contemporary media, visions of the region as a tropical ‘paradise’ abound—each peddling a fantasy carefully crafted for maximum consumption. Framing the notion of paradise as a case study in colonial myth-making, this film series centers instability, mischief, and the mundane as counter gestures to the fantasies that bind the Caribbean in a predatory economic and cultural relationship with the Global North.
Celaje (Cloudscape) Sofía Gallisá Muriente, screening on Sunday, April 10 with the director in attendance. oscillates between chronicle, dream and document; using nature's time to interpret human cycles. Combining images filmed on 16mm and Super8, home movies, a found quarter-inch audio tape, old and hand-developed film, and an original score by José Iván Lebrón Moreira, the essay film is an elegy to the death of the Puerto Rican colonial project and the sedimentation of disasters in this Caribbean island. Memories move around like clouds, images rot and age, and the traces of the process are visible on the film and in the country, like ghosts.
Esther Figueroa’s Jamaica for Sale, screening on Sunday, April 17 , connects the tourism industry and its ripple effects to a long legacy of extractive industry in the Caribbean, honing in on the environmental and economic impacts of overdevelopment. Through her engagement with a wide range of Jamaicans—workers, environmentalists, scholars, and small business owners—Figueroa’s documentary reckons with the false promise of prosperity through tourism, in a country that remains highly dependent on it.
The program ‘Beyond the Gates,’ showing on Sunday, April 24, presents a pairing of films that center the experiences of working-class Dominicans. In both Dalissa Montes de Oca’s Pacaman and Johanné Gómez Terrero’s Caribbean Fantasy, the everyday grind of keeping one’s head above water takes precedence, yielding a more nuanced portrait of life, labor, and class in Santo Domingo that purposely departs from the usual tourist fare of sunny shores and colonial architecture.
With her latest short Pacaman, Montes de Oca crafts an alternate vision of Santo Domingo via its bustling informal market, “La Duarte.” A humming soundscape anchors a cinema verité approach that blends both digital and analog formats, as Pacaman shines a light on the market’s vendors and their endless hustle. A captivating portrait of love and life on the banks of Santo Domingo’s Ozama River, Caribbean Fantasy follows Ruddy and Morena—a boatman and a married Evangelist—as they navigate a relationship as tenuous as the community they call home. Honing in on La Ciénaga de los Gandules, a barrio long neglected by the city, Gómez invites viewers to consider what lies beyond the veneer of more traditional “Caribbean fantasies.”
Closing the series, and in celebration of International Workers’ Day, the program “Maintenance Work” considers the labor required to uphold the idyllic settings associated with notions of paradise. From Joiri Minaya’s Labadee to Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada’s Site of Sites / El sitio de los sitios, the films gathered here revel in the mundane, slyly swapping the fantasies of the West for the perspectives of those who are often kept consciously out of view.
With sly humor and acerbic wit, the short film Labadee hones in on the gulf of power and privilege that exists between cruise guests, employees, and locals. Invoking the writings of Christopher Columbus as she pans over crystalline waters, Minaya invites audiences to contemplate the connections between colonialism and extractive tourism as they play out in Labadee beach in Haiti, a “secluded piece of fake paradise, tailored to the fantasies of those who can afford it.”
With melodic precision, The Sites of Sites captures the absurdity of the tropical fantasies peddled to tourists. Here, machinery roars as workers toil to build an artificial beach, while other employees contemplate the finer things that remain endlessly out of reach. Equally incisive and humorous, The Sites of Sites highlights a Caribbean mundane normally swept out of view.
For more information visit: https://nyc.metrograph.com/series/series/320/unraveling-paradise
