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Memories of Puerto Rico
Trailer

CARTEL POSTER PUERTO RICO V9 CAS.jpg

Documentary feature film

2022

68'

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Direction, production and script: Marta Hierro and Núria Abad

Photography: Juan Carlos Azpiroz

Editing: Jaume Carlos Moranta

Sound: Marc Farre

Animation and graphics: Luis Ozonas

Music: Francisco Albeniz

Grading: Jaume Alcina

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A documentary by MOM Works in co-production with IB3, with the support of the Institut d'Indústries Culturals de les Illes Balears and the Consell de Mallorca

Awards

BEST FILM - Toronto Feedback Female Film Festival TOFFFF - 2021.png
BEST DOCUMENTARY - WRPN Womens International Film Festival - 2022.png
BEST HISTORY AND HERITAGE DOCUMENTARY - Terres Travel Festival - Films  Creativity - 2022.

Synopsis

Carles Llull and Luis Ozonas are two Mallorcan designers who, despite working in very similar fields, have never crossed paths. Everything changes the day they discover, by chance, that they are distant relatives and that they have a long history behind them, with ancestors emigrating to Puerto Rico and becoming large landowners. The family branch of one of them will keep his Puerto Rican coffee farm until today. The other will lose the link, but not the memories.

Carles and Luis embark on a trip to Puerto Rico to discover their origins, which begin in the 19th century, when the brothers Joan and Antoni Castañer emigrated from Mallorca to Puerto Rico. A story about the reunion with the past, family stories and the search for identity.
 
The emigration of Mallorcans to Puerto Rico is a known fact, but the story of Joan and Antoni Castañer, who became owners of one of the most powerful haciendas in central Puerto Rico in the 19th century, is not. Their extension covered thousands of hectares and the coffee they produced was exported all over the world, including the Vatican, through their own export-import company.
 
The 1898 war did not mean the loss of their properties for the Castañers, which continued to be operated by the family until a hurricane in 1928 ruined the hacienda. Currently, a descendant of the Castañer family is still in charge of one of the farms, recovered after the disaster, and the place where the nucleus of the hacienda was located has become a town, which receives the same name as its founders.
 
The documentary incorporates the animation, made by Luis Ozonas, a descendant of Joan Castañer, as well as the unpublished great family film archive, which is intertwined in a revealing way in the editing, poetically showing that, although times change, the imprint of the past on the space, stay
 
The documentary follows in the footsteps of Carles Llull and Luis Ozonas in their search for the family past, and includes the participation of leading experts on the phenomenon of emigration in both Mallorca and Puerto Rico. In this way, the protagonists begin their investigation in family albums and letters that are more than a century old, to end up touring Puerto Rico and meeting distant ancestors and the traces of what was, one day, the economic emporium of the Castañer family. .

Documentation

Press kit

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