The other Chronicle of a Summer; or, Caribbean layovers of transnational vérité

The early Flaherty Seminars served as incubator for the emergent form of cinéma vérité, bringing together major practitioners of a new mode that promised immediacy, objectivity, and realism. One notable collaboration between two Flaherty alumni—Michel Brault and Jean Rouch—would result in the landmark Chronicle of a Summer (1961). Before joining Rouch in Paris in the summer of 1960, however, Brault filmed Festival in Puerto Rico (1961) on location as an unofficial collaboration between the Canadian National Film Board and its Puerto Rican counterpart, the Division of Community Education. While a fulsome examination of the island’s colonial status—Free Associated Statehood—the film demonstrates a shared sensibility for vérité experimentation between the two stateless nations of Puerto Rico and Québec, each in varying stages of waging “quiet revolutions” against their respective imperial centers. Despite these political and aesthetic solidarities, Festival in Puerto Rico offers the newly ratified colonial statu