Residente'

Residente’

Just like Rene started his film, let’s claim that the creative impulse is both creative and impulsive … this film starts telling the protagonist's story explaining an early diagnosis of ADHD that was used to allow for this story to go where it wanted  —- with sharp cuts and deep drifts into other peoples lanes. At it’s most visceral,  this multi-media project entitled Residente’ spills blood and reverence across the map and its creator, Rene Perez Joglar, serves it up with an edge that cuts but does not kill.

The Define America Film Festival is a traveling story telling empathy machine (sic Roger Ebert per Jose Antonio Vargas) and this eclectic, raw sketch of consciousness, bound up in a darkish super hero/fighter origin story laced with a sinewy synapse snapping melody and heart racing beat is a pure piece of genius that both travels and tells. Granted, this is praise from a non-genius so you are required to see the film and make your own judgement.

In what I took to be an homage to the infinite possibilities of humanity, Rene shaped his music and film project around the DNA analysis that mapped his ancestry. As a man who presents as a white, hispanic -- the lineage we track down with him opens eyes and ears. He takes us through Mongolia, the Caucuses, China,  Africa and back to Puerto Rico. Of course, we all date back to nomadic hunter gatherer tribes and our genetic strands survived because our lineage survived. They hunted, they bred, they fought and they dreamt us up some way, some how. The obvious is so mind-blowing.

The film deploys music as the universal language and also allows all the protagonists to speak their own mother verse, creating a soundtrack that could be enjoyed without subtitles it is so musical. The energies Rene brings and finds waiting at each of his stepping off points is raw, integrated, ancient and angry. It has moments of simple birth and complex apocalypse. It is psychedelic in that it invades your mind and connects neurons that have been avoiding one another for a while.

Animation, origami and single camera studio scenes are interspersed with the butchering of a high mountain ram and the quick throat snatch of a cock fight. The female voice artists that carry this complex musical composition are throaty and angelic. Rene’s beats and hip hop carry the Peking Opera and the Anglican pipe organ into modernity and our field of view. If this review feels a bit ADHD, jump back to the first paragraph.

Never really knowing where I was in the story or where I was headed, the last twenty minutes of the film set in Puerto Rico (yes there is an oddly placed solo performance of Lin Manuel Miranda in a studio I guess is in PR) grabbed me by my manhood. If I were to claim my citizenship I should have to know the story of colonizing the indigenous and the immigrant races of this Caribbean Island. I had no clue. 

Rene introduced us to his most recent people, the fighters for a free Puerto Rico — they reject statehood or commonwealth/colonization. They have a vision of a people free to reclaim the land and the heritage ripped from them in a century long and ongoing campaign of greed and racism and terrorism. If you don’t know the history, as I too was even more ignorant, it was American military forces that stole the sugar cane fields and trapped the people of Puerto Rico in  slave wage labor, poverty and subservience. This was a major WTF moment. But it was so hyper charged by the impulsive creativity of the filmmaker that I felt I had a solution/idea/hope. ….

Since our nation is the murderer and rapist,  we first have to admit we have a problem and stop the violence and the terror. Then we need to do a searching and deep moral inventory. Then, having stopped causing harm and having discovered our role in our own destruction, we need to make amends to those we have harmed. We need to forgive all of the island’s crushing debt and fund their independence. This is a no brainer really. See the movie, listen to the album. See what you think. This is something we can do something about. If we are not impulsively distracted by the next shiny thing …. Thank you Rene!