Island is Enchanted with You (The)

In 1511, Indigenous people in Puerto Rico seduced and murdered a representative of colonial power. Some 300 years later, a further chapter of colonial history: in 1803, by order of the Spanish Crown, a doctor named Francisco Javiér de Balmis travelled to Puerto Rico with a number of orphans. They were carriers of the live vaccine with which Balmis executed one of the first mass immunisations against smallpox. Switch to the present day: in 2014, Puerto Rico produced an enormous amount of pharmaceuticals with subsidies from the USA. By interweaving strands of colonial and postcolonial history, the filmmakers of La Isla está Encantada con Ustedes have created a lyrical work that mirrors and expands on dynamics of power and lust. A modern roundelay that restages the past in the present. Led by a gaze of sexual innuendo, this is a comedy in which reality is subordinate to strategies of power – while revealing the closely intertwined nature of health and economics, in the past and present.

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