Puerto Rico and Chile won Isla Verde Film Festival awards

Among the 30 works from 15 competing countries featured on the list of finalists, the short and feature film juries awarded the prizes of the 2nd Caribbean International Film and Environment Festival “Isla Verde” to audiovisuals from Puerto Rico and Chile, respectively.

Puerto Rican filmmaker Llaima Suwani Sanfiorenzo’s short film Todavía la semilla won the first prize for its poetic depiction of a story built on the memory of the seeds to restore the identity of and belonging to the Pachamama, whereas the winning full-length film was the Chilean Will Parrinello's Agua es vida, a piece that brings together three pillars of the efforts to protect nature, namely social, gender and environmental justice.

The Peruvian documentary filmmakers Rita Sánchez, Joaquina Izaguirre and Mara Corrales won the special prize of the jury with La voz del huito, which narrates the memory of our peoples from a decolonizing perspective based on the faith on our Mother Earth through an indigenous voice—that of Luis Tayori, a descendant of the Harakbut indigenous tribe of the Peruvian jungle.

Cuban filmmaker Maikel Jorge Pascual’s documentary Huracanolitos, a contribution to the scientific knowledge about hurricanes in Cuba’s Isle of Youth, and the Chilean Crisitiano Bendinell’s Amanda, for its lyrical and aesthetic approach to the problems that transnational companies cause to the country’s fishing communities, deserved special mentions.