Under the Same Sun, a contender at the Havana International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, confirms Ulises Porra as a singular voice in contemporary Hispanic cinema. The director single-handedly undertook an ambitious project that led him to film almost entirely in the Dominican jungle, facing geographical and climatic challenges that ultimately become an essential part of the narrative.

The result is an immersive film with powerful sensory impact, which revisits the colonial era of 1819 to speak, from a vibrant intimacy, about cultural tensions, historical inequalities, and personal quests that still resonate today.

The cinematography and sound design build an emotional landscape as real as the thicket surrounding the characters, reinforcing the idea highlighted by the title: under the same sun we are equal, regardless of origin, time, or condition.

The film's greatest value lies in the complex humanity of its three protagonists: a Spanish heir, a Chinese weaver, and a Haitian deserter who, in the turbulence of the colonial Caribbean, must learn to rely on each other to survive and find a place of their own.

Porra weaves this forced coexistence with the subtlety of one who understands that bonds are born not from epic deeds, but from shared vulnerabilities. Thus emerges an atypical family, united by emotional voids, imposed obligations, and wounds that do not distinguish ethnicity or borders.

Under the Same Sun not only reconstructs a historical moment but also challenges the viewer through the universality of its characters, reminding us that the struggles to belong, to heal, and to move forward remain the same, whether in the colony or in contemporary times.

Title: Under the Same Sun
Countries: Dominican Republic / Spain
Direction: Ulises Porra
Screenplay and Editing: Ulises Porra
Main Cast: David Castillo, Valentina Shen Wu, Jean Jean
Genre: Historical Drama / Colonial Period

Absence and Memory

The Ecuadorian documentary Echo of Light emerges as a work of profound emotional and aesthetic resonance. Far from merely reconstructing a family album, the film transforms this intimate act into a broader exploration of the voids left by paternal absence and the ways in which memory—fluid, fragmented, sometimes painful—can open spaces for healing.

Using his grandfather's old camera as both tool and symbol, Misha Vallejo Prut penetrates territories once forbidden to his family, illuminating secrets and violences that had remained in shadow. This personal search becomes, on screen, a collective mirror that speaks to the region: a call to understand how silences are inherited and how they can be mended.

The significance of Echo of Light also lies in the creative strength that supports its vision. Vallejo Prut, a documentary photographer with a widely recognized career in Europe and the Americas, makes his feature-length debut with a proposal that combines artistic sensitivity and conceptual rigor, while producer Mayfe Ortega Haboud contributes a perspective where cinema, visual anthropology, and community work converge.

This alliance results in a film distinguished not only by its aesthetic force—where every frame seems to contain a latent revelation—but also by its capacity to raise questions about how we inhabit masculinity today.

By intertwining memory, art, and reparation, Echo of Light establishes itself as one of the most significant documentaries in contemporary Latin America, a testimony that vibrates—like the photographs that inspire it—with the power of what is looked upon again to be reborn.

Title: Echo of Light
Country: Ecuador
Genre: Documentary
Direction: Misha Vallejo Prut
Production: Mayfe Ortega Haboud

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque / CubaSí Translation Staff