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La película extranjera (1999) Photo/Foto: HIDVL
  • Title: La película extranjera
  • Duration: 00:21:35
  • Language: Spanish
  • Date: 1999
  • Location: Performed in San Juan, Puerto Rico
  • Type-Format: film
  • Cast: Teresa Hernández, Pedro Adorno, Eduardo Alegría, Yuisa Buxeda, Javier Cardona, Conchita Cisnero, José Samuel Coss, Patricia Dávila, Yaraní del Valle, Jerry, Mayna Magruder, Muppet la Oveja, Lydia Platón, Viveca Vázquez.
  • Credits: Teresa Hernández, producer, director, concept, and text ; Producciones Teresa, no inc., producer ; Daniel Cotté, director of photography ; Vicente Juarbe, editor.

La película extranjera (1999)

Short film by Puerto Rican stage artist Teresa Hernández and her Producciones Teresa, no inc., in collaboration with director of photography Daniel Cotté and editor Vicente Juarbe. Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island struggling with an authentic identity crisis, torn in the in-between zone of an oblique colonialism, delusions of cosmopolitan aspirations sold by tourism advertisements, a half baked bilingualism, and self-inflicted bigotry, produces a "foreign film" which is at the same time a "Puerto Rican movie." Spoken in a fictional pidgin, and subtitled in Spanish, it portrays a tragicomic Grand Reunion of individuals fixed on evading and denying the "Puerto Rican condition" through the impersonation of alternative citizenships and absurd allegiances. The video art piece show subjects living in anachronism and escapism, surrounding themselves in an artificial aura of the exotic that directly contrasts with the everyday life in the island's metropolitan area. The short film, shown as a stand-alone piece in film festivals locally and abroad, is also a building block of sorts, combined and recombined by Hernández in her multimedia spectacles in order to explore and unveil the complex layers of negotiation and denial at play in issues of identity politics of our postmodern societies.

 


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