This month docuseries, POV, will highlight Caribbean narratives told from the female perspective in their current Season 34 program. The two multi-award-winning titles, Landfall by Cecilia Aldarondo and Stateless by Michèle Stephenson, offer nuanced investigations into tandem social, political, and economic conflicts currently at play on the Caribbean island nations of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively. Both documentaries are set to have their broadcast premieres on PBS and pov.org in July, Landfall premiering on Monday, July 12 and Stateless on Monday, July 19.
The documentaries, both from female directors and with majority female casts and crews, provide deeply necessary looks into a region not always comprehensively represented by and within the mainstream media.
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 Puerto Rico, spotlighting the different ways each community addresses its own recovery. Aldarondo was also a 2021 Independent Spirit Award “Truer than Fiction” nominee.
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.
Michèle Stephenson’s Stateless focuses on the island of Hispaniola, home to both the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The film examines the complex racial histories and contemporary politics of the neighboring nations. Sharing one border and a single island, Stephenson takes a deep dive into a sociopolitical crisis that has deep roots in both the island’s history of slavery and dictatorship. Stephenson’s newest documentary uncovers the complex histories and present-day politics of Haiti and the Dominican Republic by following the grassroots campaign of a hopeful young attorney named Rosa Iris.
Providing sociopolitical insights that are at once deeply personal and powerfully far-reaching, Stateless reveals the depths of racial hatred and institutionalized oppression dividing two nations tasked with sharing one small island at a moment when the Dominican Republic is raising funds to build a border wall, echoing recent policies in the United States.
Addressing these historical markers head-on, Stephenson’s documentary centers Rosa Iris and her campaign as she challenges electoral corruption and fights to protect the right to citizenship for all people. Topics of nationalism, naturalization, birthright citizenship, and the racial implications of government record-keeping take center stage.
Stateless combines gritty hidden-camera footage with the legend of a young woman fleeing brutal violence to flip the narrative axis, exposing the magnitude and pervasiveness of racially- informed government discrimination and the inescapable, bureaucratic practices meant to keep Dominican nationalist, and anti-black, policies in place. Told completely from female perspectives on both sides of the conflict, Stephenson prioritizes the role of women in processes of nation-making, storytelling, and enculturation, or the transmission between generations of notions of self in relation to shared group histories.
The American Documentary produced, POV, is returning to PBS in July with Stateless and Landfall in addition to a slate of films that reaffirm public media’s vital role in sparking national dialogue and featuring seven powerful and critically-acclaimed Latin American and Latinx-focused documentaries, making up more than half of this year’s lineup and co-presented with Latino Public Broadcasting.
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