Anti-Colonial Cinema Practices: Dialogical, Experimental, Photochemical Film Praxis in Puerto Rico

To be anti-colonial is to reject in thought and deed the legitimacy of the colonial situation and how it frames your thinking and moving through the world. In the years I have been working in/with/alongside Puerto Rico/Puerto Ricans this has meant: giving back as much as I extract of people’s time, words and images in ways that are useful and make sense to my interlocutors; engaging in sustained dialogical inquiry where directed conversation around a topic provides meaningful context and content for the work being produced; and creating new methods and methodologies for using the tools and materials I am thinking with/through to both reveal the imperialist agenda that their production is meant to uphold/obscure (in the case of found footage) and create new images and sounds that acknowledge my role/identity as a filmmaker from the colonizing country while respecting the personhood and sovereignty of the people and places I am photographing. ANTI-COLONIAL CINEMA PRACTICES: dialogical ethnographic and photochemical film praxis in Puerto Rico utilizes a combination of writing styles moving from poetic, to ethnographic reportage, to theoretical analysis and back with a central focus on how this praxis emerges from my primary creative identity as an experimental filmmaker.