In an influential and controversially sweeping formulation, cultural theorist Fredric Jameson argued 40 years ago that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.” To tell stories from the decolonizing global South using forms and genres developed and disseminated within the framework of racial capitalism entailed responding to “the logic of the cultural imperialism of the first world and above all of the United States.” Jameson’s formulation is both illuminating and limiting in understanding Esta Isla (This Island), the first fictional feature from Puerto Rican co-directors Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carrero.
This Island‘s script is shot through with the geopolitical connotations Jameson termed “allegory” during the same decade that saw the heavy repression of the most populous US territory’s independence movement. At the same time, Molina and Carrero’s intensely visual storytelling insists on the irreducible particularity of the individual experiences through which those allegories are formed, fragmented, and appropriated as resistance. “Colonialism doesn’t just show up in history books,” Molina and Carrero explain, “it shows up in our relationships, in the way we move through the world.”
From its opening title, Esta Isla embraces the complexity and contradictions of Jameson’s formulation and Puerto Rico’s unique situation in relation to the US and its Caribbean neighbors. “In the end, we are all Caribbean,” a plaintain farmer from the Dominican Republic concludes in one of the many intimate but wide-ranging conversations that emerge when the film’s main action pauses for breath. “A single family. Antillean!”
As a title, that is, This Island contains multitudes. Certainly, it denotes one unique land mass among the thousands that make up the Caribbean; moreover, depending on how we choose to stress its two syllables, esta can mean anything from an expression of astonishment to a term of endearment to an interjection of utter exasperation. The film ambitiously seeks to condense this full range of connotations while reckoning with cultural imperialism, repudiating its sweeping limitations, and incorporating a capsule history of the island into a young-lovers-on-the-run action plot. It also pays homage to Puerto Rico’s natural beauty and deeply rooted traditions.
Esta Isla elicited, at least from this viewer, the full gamut of reactions suggested by its title. This movie, I kept saying to myself, this movie, never able to settle on a single definitive statement.
The spine of This Island is the coming-of-age story of Bebo (Zion Ortiz), the adolescent son of fishermen whose parents were lost at sea when he was a child, leaving him to be raised by his uncle Charlie (Xavier A. Morales). Because, as Charlie tells his aging mother Aida at one point, no one on the island can actually support their family on minimum wage, he smuggles on the side.
When Charlie is murdered by drug dealers, Bebo, who dreams of raising horses for a living, is forced to flee to the highlands after an abortive attempt at revenge. He is joined by his girlfriend, Lola (Fabiola Brown), the restless stepdaughter of a wealthy and abusive American businessman. The plot, as this partial summary indicates, contains enough potential pulp for a long-running miniseries; to the film’s credit, what scant exposition we’re provided is deeply embedded in everyday life and interactions, and mostly functions as backdrop and backstory to the difficult decisions facing Bebo and his family.
Consequently, in the few instances where the plot does come prominently to the fore, as in the choice to use Charlie’s murder as an inciting incident to get Bebo and Lola on the run and into the backcountry, it can feel contrived rather than earned. However, when Molina, Carrero, and their co-writer Kisha Tikina Burgos instead confound expectations and subordinate the genre tropes to the rhythms of everyday life on the island, as they do especially in the stronger second half of the film, the compulsion to show how everything, but everything, is connected with everything else pays off. Rather than a rigid allegory, they show that the stuff of life is woven out of the intertwined threads of everything; it’s easier to approach separately, one by one.
This Island‘s Knots of Meaning
At times, it feels as if the filmmakers are trying to cram everything there is to know about this island into this story. This Island is desperate to live up to its all-encompassing title. At other times, it finds its way to a place where its many different threads are concentrated, knotted together in a dense node of meaning: politics, class, gender, colonial history, gringos, drugs, horses, rainforest, farming, fishing, and, everywhere, surrounding and containing everything else, the sea. Genres tend to unravel these knots by cutting through all but a single thread or two, a handful of lives stylized to suit the action. Esta Isla embraces the challenge of patiently tracing the unfrayed knots.
There’s a flashback near the end of Bebo, sitting on the beach with Charlie, backlit by a bonfire, that captures the desire for clarity along with its impossibility. “Here is where I want to live forever,” Charlie tells him. “In this memory.” It’s a simple, beautiful, elegiac moment. It’s also a moment we’ve seen earlier, echoing through it without the motivation being directly articulated. It becomes the action that triggers most of the drama overtaking their lives. There is no separating the moment you want to live in forever from the moment that will keep you from being able to; they’re one and the same.
Both filmmakers have a background in documentary filmmaking, and some of the strongest scenes in Esta Isla are observational interludes of daily life, both time-honored and new. The film was shot by Cedric Cheung-Lau primarily in natural light; the production actively involved the local community; and the filmmakers blended professionals and non-actors, casting the latter in roles that closely reflect their life experiences.
We learn about the nocturnal practice of casería de jueyes, or land crab hunting, from following Charlie’s silent pursuit, shadowed by his wife Angie (Janiffe Frett), one of the few times we see them together alone. We learn about the government-sponsored monocultural production of plantains while also following Cora (Teófilo Torres) as he tends to his chickens, smokes his bees, and carves and paints a wooden Santa Barbara, Catholic saint syncretized in Puerto Rico with the Yoruba orisha of thunder and lightning Changó and patron of those who work in dangerous occupations.
Like the script, the camera is firmly situated in the perspective of Bebo’s humble family; however, This Island carefully traces the dense networks that imbricate them not only in the ongoing struggles of village life in an impoverished territory but also in transnational webs of trafficking and commerce. Bebo daydreams of shoveling manure on a horse farm in Florida, working up the ladder in a working-class fantasy of upward mobility.
Lola and Bebo meet when a childhood friend of Charlie’s persuades him to do a small-time deal; she’s buying at the local club, and the principal scene of drug consumption we see is of her and her privileged friends hanging out around the pool of her stepfather’s hilltop mansion, consuming every drug in sight. They never articulate what attracts them to each other, letting the fact of their relationship exist within a full range of overlapping, contradictory motivations.
As the filmmakers express this strategy, “Puerto Rico exists in a strange in-between—not quite a nation, not quite a state—with a history marked by resistance, creativity, and deep colonial trauma. This Island doesn’t explain that history—it embodies it.”
Lola’s backstory begs to be read allegorically: her father, killed as a member of the US military in the Iraq War, had also been a revolutionary fighting for Puerto Rico’s independence, and their excursion into the mountain rainforest is not only a flight for Bebo’s life but also a journey into her past. The convention of fictional realism contrives cohesive narrative arcs through plot coincidences and improbabilities; meet a character anywhere in Dickens, and they will turn out to be connected to all the others in the most unlikely yet emotionally satisfying way. These are also the coincidences and improbabilities that really do distinguish everyday life from fixed allegories and that permeate small communities.
We can read Lola’s backstory either way, or, perhaps, both at once. For reasons that are never explained, her mother somehow went from partner of a revolutionary to trophy wife of an American businessman; Cora, the old man that finds them in the rainforest, is an old compatriot of Lola’s father, and so on. Esta Isla oscillates uneasily among the various pulls of its formal palette: narco-thriller, neorealist docudrama of a changing island, dreaming-and-waking sequences marked by “surrealism and absurdity”, and breathtaking, color-saturated homages to Puerto Rico’s coastline and rainforest.
Molina and Carrero wager that we’ll go along with the refusal of fixed meanings and easy trajectories, and will resist falling back into familiar patterns even when the gangster plot seems poised to force us to. It’s a tightrope walk, but the filmmakers keep their balance more often than not.
The pointed inclusion of non-plot action, sound disjointed from image, slow observation of everyday life, and moments snatched away from everyday life, make Esta Isla, at times, feel as if an extra 20 minutes has been stitched into the fabric of a tight 90-minute thriller. As a lifetime inhabitant of “gringolandia”, as one of the characters refers to the monolith to their north, this viewer wondered multiple times how much extra meaning and connections he was missing that the local audience would understand effortlessly.
Indeed, the requirement that independent films from the global South speak to a gringolandian audience “invested in high-quality international and Latin-American arthouse cinema” while also being dedicated, as Esta Isla most certainly is, to its own people has been a pressure point for indie cinema. This is especially since it became both big business and a viable production in the same 1980s when Jameson was worrying about the national allegories that dwell on that pressure point. Switch out PR for a myriad of other options, and you’re indeed back in the heart of that argument.
However, that does not mean that both statements can’t be true at the same time. As Molina and Carretero know well, photogenic young leads and endlessly adaptable narrative archetypes are time-honored riggings with which to float intensely local stories and concerns. As they also know well, any misstep risks those same floats pulling you under. The first sign that they’ve avoided a shipwreck is that someone like me is reviewing the film in gringolandia. This Island is traveling, in other words, despite all the weight of allegory it’s embracing.
There’s another poignant moment late in the story when Lola is walking along the side of a highway, a sight that sparks anxiety, whether we’re using the lens of narrative expectations or common sense. We hear the words “Are you alright?” before we see the car that has stopped or the driver speaking them; the camera holds instead on Lola’s tense face. Finally persuaded to accept a ride from the older woman who’s driving, we see her face visibly relax; the passenger seat becomes a transitory space of safety.
In addition to a narrative function, this brief scene references the high rate of femicide in Puerto Rico, which declared a state of emergency in 2021, and the constant risk to a young woman like Lola in this situation. This is yet another cultural backstory, this time woven into her character, although seldom foregrounded in the plot. Like many of the choices and risks Molina, Carretero, and Burgos take, this scene is at once an intensely fraught moment for a single character.
It’s also a conversation with a broader crisis in Puerto Rico, a plot point in Esta Isla‘s romance, and an allegory of the treacherous in-between walk their film is trying to chart. I’m pleased to report that, at least this time, and from where I’m standing, they made it.
Resources
Experimento Lúdico Productions, Esta Isla press kit, 2025
Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. Social Text. 1983.