LandfallDirected by CeciliaAldarondo, 2020, 91 minutes, color. Distributed by Good Docs, www.gooddocs.net

When does crisis begin and end?In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Maria, US news media issued urgent reports of Puerto Rico's widespread devastation and exigent federal aid response.In the course of a year, these accounts quickly gave way to subdued predictions that conditions of emergency were "the new normal" for the island territory (CBS News, 2018).Such fleeting depictions frame environmental catastrophe as an isolated incident, detached from inciting structures of coloniality.Cecilia Aldarondo's 2020 documentary Landfall offers a critical rejoinder to these singular narratives of disaster (Figure 1).Filmed in Puerto Rico during the two years following Maria, Landfall provides a portrait of events that ultimately led former Governor Ricardo Rossell to resign in 2019.Here, the aftermath of disaster prompted one of the largest grassroot movements in Puerto Rico's history.Through the stories of Puerto Rican community organizers, farmers, hurricane survivors, and long-term residents, as well as those of tech CEO Brock Pierce, luxury real estate developers, and venture capitalists from the mainland United States, the film explores competing trajectories of recovery as imagined and enacted by these disparate actors.Aldarondo's conceptual approach to visualizing and narrating experiences of disaster directs attention to the everyday lives of Puerto Rican people as they cope with uncertainty while advocating for their own visions of futurity.Through affective, sensorial, and nonlinear ethnographic storytelling, Landfall advocates for a radical reimagination of recovery frameworks.It is an effort to return agency and self-determination to those affected by environmental catastrophe through protected rights to land, livelihood, public welfare, and independent governance.While mainstream media narratives often situate conditions of displacement and destruction as temporally bounded, direct outcomes of a single disaster event, Hurricane Maria was one of many crises in Puerto Rico's history (Bonilla, 2020, 2-3).Complicating the unitary framing of natural disaster discourse, Landfall follows Puerto Rican activists and community members as they contest the destructive forces of capitalism, colonialism, and climate change.Weaving together scenes of protests opposing welfare cuts under the Obamaappointed Junta administration with archival footage of US military operations, Landfall collapses temporal distinctions between the past and present dispossessions that contribute to Puerto Rico's long-term state of emergency.Aldarondo juxtaposes archival advertisements that brand Puerto Rico as a vacation paradise with present-day images of American tourists who pose besides Spanish conquistador statues.Shots of new luxury resorts interpose residents' oral histories to accentuate the causes of their forced displacement.Through this 2 of 4 | CRITIQUE nonlinear structure, Aldarondo traces how enduring regimes of US economic extraction-responsible for the island's $72 billion debt crisis-are now reframed as recovery solutions.The film thus demonstrates the "coloniality of disaster" (Bonilla, 2020) that shapes US federal response to Maria.Privatization and austerity measures continue the longstanding projects of land and resource extraction that eroded public services, infrastructure, and residents' self-determination long before the hurricane.The film presents debris-ridden landscapes as evidence of the US government's humanitarian failure; shots of expired water bottles abandoned in overgrown grass punctuate survivors' accounts of federal aid mismanagement.Landfall provokes viewers to reconsider who is responsible for the catastrophe Puerto Rico must now recover from.Landfall traverses the island to meet farmers in the fields of Orocovis, venture capitalists in luxury resorts of Rincn, community organizers in Condado, and migrants in New York City.As such, it maps the uneven geographies of disaster effects.At a closed-door meeting in Condado, a group of white investors scrutinize a map of the island that is displayed on a