“American colonialist imperialism by it’s application of politics that are genocidal and destructive to the personality of the Puerto Rican people to this day, has managed to create a Puerto Rican with a profound dose of repressed violence whose explosion if released would be completely uncontrollable.” – Comandante Filiberto

Today is the 115th anniversary of the insurrection by Puerto Rican revolutionaries against Spanish colonial rule known as El Grito de Lares. On September 23rd of 1868, in the mountain town of Lares Puerto Rico in the center of the island nation a few hundred men and women staged a rebellion to declare Puerto Rico a sovereign nation in the eyes of the world. It was an audacious, risky and daring move on the part of these few brave revolutionaries but isn’t it always that way?

The rebellion was initially planned for September 27th but the revolutionaries were betrayed and the declaration of the Republic of Puerto Rico was declared four days early. The rebels were waiting for a cache of weapons to arrive by sea but when they found out about the betrayal they were forced to move the attack up to the 23rd. Those few days cost them the rebellion. Spain was prepared for the ill-equipped rebels and the rebellion was quickly put down.

Despite the betrayal and it’s subsequent putting down, El Grito de Lares was not a complete failure. In the years following it spawned other revolts against Spanish colonial rule in Las Marías, Adjuntas, Utuado, Vieques, Bayamón, Ciales and Toa Baja. The abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 can also be traced back to these revolts. El Grito de Lares also led to a framework of autonomy that Puerto Rico achieved from Spain in 1897. An autonomy that would never come to its full fruition when the US invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and took the island nation as its own colony after the Spanish-American War.

The significance of El Grito de Lares continues to both haunt and inspire Puerto Ricans. It’s a day that’s celebrated and commemorated each year in the mountain town of Lares. It’s also the day that the FBI assassinated independence leader Comandante Filiberto in 2005 a few miles from that annual celebration. As a speech that Filiberto had sent to the celebration played the FBI and Filiberto were locked in a gun battle that resulted in Filiberto being shot and wounded. As he lay bleeding his speech played. The FBI refused to approach him as he laying bleeding and left him to bleed out for over 24 hours. The esoteric distant memory of El Grito de Lares in 1868 became the tangible weight of El Grito de Lares in 2005.

Filiberto was given a warrior’s funeral. The outrage of the FBI going after Filiberto and assassinating him on this day of all days that all Puerto Ricans consider sacred was expressed in a mixture of rage and sadness the days that followed his assassination and reached a fevered apex on his burial day. Filiberto had the largest funeral in the history of Puerto Rico.

MACHETERO is my narrative feature film debut as a writer, producer and director and it’s a film that was made in a very large part to help address this rebel history that’s been kept hidden from both Puerto Ricans and non Puerto Ricans alike.. The film won awards in South Africa, Wales, England, Thailand, Ireland and New York. It’s a labor of love. A love for cinema, love for art, and love for freedom. It wasn’t easy to make and it’s been a long hard road filled with obstacles that needed to be overcome. So it’s with great pride and immense joy mixed that i’m choosing this day to announce the release of MACHETERO online On Demand through Vimeo. However that pride and that joy is mixed with an equal dose of rage and sadness because Puerto Rico is still a colony of the US and the ghost that is the spirit of El Grito de Lares still haunts us…

 

>via: http://nothingtobegainedhere.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/machetero-on-demand-on-el-grito-de-lares/

To say Machetero, the award winning debut feature film by Vagabond, is unique in nearly every way is an understatement. Machetero is film that is a punk style, gritty and technically not structured in a traditional manner but yet with specific and intentional use of voice over, text and songs to shape the narrative in what Vagabond describes as an ‘Avant Garde Musical’. The subject is set around an idea that resonates even more today with the question of who is considered a “Freedom Fighter” and who is considered a “Terrorist” in the face of land occupation but uses the resistance movement in Puerto Rico to US colonialism as its theme – a controversial subject matter that hasn’t been explored much in fictional cinema.  Vagabond madeMachetero, guerilla, no budget, “what-the-hell-is-a-permit?” style with friends for over ten years believing with drive and passion that it would find its audience one day.  LatinoBuzz: How important was this film for you to hold on and believe in it for so long?Vagabond: I wrote the script for Machetero in 2002 and I’ve been working on and off on this film for about 10 years. Machetero was initially conceived as a short film and so there was no intent to make it a feature but the first cut I did of the film was 45 minutes and making it shorter was not an option because the ideas we were exploring about terrorism and terrorists in a post 9/11 world were so dense. Our only option at that point was to improvise what we had into a feature length film. Holding on for that long and believing in the film was easy. On an artistic or creative level I wasn’t trying to make Machetero I was trying to let the film make itself and allowing for that process took more time than someone might take with a project. I learned to be patient with Machetero and the reward for that patience was an understanding that I make films because I have a question that only the process of making a film can answer. The other element that tested my patience was that I work within the constraints of having very little in the way of resources and almost no money and that dictated the pace of production. The real test to my belief and my patience came after I made the film and I got rejection letter after rejection letter from US based film festivals. I was happy with the film, I thought I did some interesting things with structure and storytelling but it didn’t seem to click with anyone in the US. It shocked me because I had Isaach de Bankolé in the film and he’s worked with some of the most interesting filmmakers in the world, Jim Jarmusch, Claire Denis, Lars Von Trier, Nicolas Roeg, Michael Mann. I mean, Isaach is no slouch, he’s careful who he works with and he chose to work with me on Machetero but it didn’t seem to do anything for me in terms of having a name or a star helping you to get into festivals or get the film some recognition. That was something that kind of shook my belief. It wasn’t until we started doing festivals outside the US that we started to get some traction and my faith for staying the course was five awards overseas.LatinoBuzz: How important is it that Latinos support a project such as this?Vagabond: If we’re talking about Latino’s supporting this project because it’s made by Latino’s and the subject matter is Latino in nature then I think that happens organically. I’m self-releasing Machetero and I went to the Puerto Rican Day parade to promote it by handing out thousands of postcards and for the most part when I told people this was my film, 95% of them were genuinely interested in supporting it. i think that Latinos are like anyone else, they want to see their own do well. If we’re talking about Latino support in terms of helping a film or filmmaker into mainstream success, I’m not sure how important it is for Latinos to support a project, because I don’t think that Latino support of a project helps brings mainstream attention or success. And that’s not just something that’s true for Latino’s but true for African American filmmakers as well. There isn’t an pipeline in place in the US by which Latino or African American films or filmmakers are lifted up by their own and guided into wider recognition. I think we as people of color like to believe the myth, that if we are supported by our own people then we can create that pipeline. But the pipeline doesn’t exist and wishing it, doesn’t make it so. There aren’t any mechanisms that Latinos or African Americans have that act as a conduit to finding a wider audience. There is no apparatus that we’ve built that allows us to decide who we want to uplift and represent us outside of our own community. There are no places that people outside of our community go to find out, who we as a community, are supporting. i think that part of the fault for that, is on us as a community for not creating a pipeline that feeds the mainstream. However, i also i think, that a large of part of why that pipeline doesn’t exist is that the mainstream likes to choose who and what it likes, to represent us, so that it can maintain it’s own power.

 

LatinoBuzz: Do you think more films should be made about the political history in Latin America and the Caribbean?

Vagabond: Yeah I do. I think there’s such a lack of films on the political history of Latin America and the Caribbean coming from filmmakers in that region or from out of that diaspora and I think that we need a barrage of them. My film is often criticized by people for not being everything to everyone, not so much because they find Machetero lacking but because our representation on so many issues is lacking. Especially on a political and historical front. Puerto Ricans aren’t used to seeing their political history told and so they don’t know when they might see themselves or their stories in a film again. I wasn’t surprised to hear people ask me why i didn’t shine a light on every aspect of Puerto Rico’s history because there are no films about Puerto Rico’s political history. So the criticism that’s being leveled at me and at Machetero is one that’s coming out of frustration, out of the lack, out of the need. Once I tell them that I did all that I could with what I had they begin to realize that Machetero is just one film trying to fill a space that needs to be filled by dozens of films by Puerto Rican filmmakers. This isn’t just a problem in Puerto Rico but also in the Dominican Republic and Haiti and Jamaica and El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua and a number of other places. The need for these people to have their own political history included in a cinematic form is dire. And not by someone coming off the almighty mountain of Hollywood in some twisted version of Cinematic Manifest Destiny but a cinema that comes from the people of those countries shaping their own national cinema.

LatinoBuzz: What story do you want to tell next?

Vagabond: I’m working on trying to put together a few projects. One of the projects I’m working on is a film about former US held Puerto Rican Political Prisoner of War Dylcia Pagán. It’s called Freedom On Layaway and it’s a documentary that focuses on her arrest, imprisonment and release but the documentary is framed within a narrative structure. I’m also working on a crime genre film about a young man who is forced into a life of crime in order to save his family but it’s difficult because he’s got a strict ethical code that he lives by and that creates conflict with the criminals he runs with. If my luck holds I may be able to shoot that starting this fall. If that doesn’t happen I’ll try and shoot another film that I have on deck that’s the modern day retelling of the Jesus Christ story. Except Jesus is Puerto Rican and born in a Casita in the South Bronx and his disciples are considered a terrorist cell. Needless to say he’s crucified all over again because people don’t seem to learn from history. A real dream project of mine though is a film about the FBI assassination of Puerto Rican independence leader Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Filiberto was kind of like the Puerto Rican ‘Che Guevara’. He was killed on September 23rd, a Puerto Rican national holiday known as El Grito De Lares, a holiday marking the violent uprising against Spanish colonial rule in 1868. Filiberto was on the FBI’s most wanted list and even though he lived in clandestinity, he wrote articles and gave radio and television interviews. As he lay shot and bleeding to death in his home his last audio speech could be heard at the Grito De Lares celebration just a short distance away. When Dylcia Pagán commented on the assassination she said it wasn’t just an attack on Filiberto but an attempt to kill the independence movement in Puerto Rico. It just doesn’t get any more political, historical, dramatic or cinematic than that.

Naturally Vagabond would self distribute, grass roots style at the Clemente Soto Velez Theater – which holds greater meaning that the theater is named after a Puerto Rican nationalist, writer and activist – in NYC’s Lower East Side on June 12^th for an initial one week run through June 19^th. Screenings will include Q&A’s. For more info check out their website: www.machetero-movie.com and ‘Like’ them at www.facebook.com/MACHETERO.MOVIE.

Written by Juan Caceres and Vanessa Erazo, LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.

 

>via: http://blogs.indiewire.com/sydneylevine/latinobuzz-interview-with-machetero-filmmaker-vagabond