At Glenda Martes’s 43rd birthday celebration last summer, party favors mix with evidence of transience: there’s a plastic tiara, balloons and silly string; generic hotel photos on the walls, a wall of Goya food cans on the dresser. There are friends who met as refugees in a Bronx hotel, and a Facetime call from a relative still at home, in Puerto Rico. “Let me make a wish,” Glenda says as she prepares to blow out the candles, but a child cuts in first: “I wish to have an apartment!”
After Maria, a new documentary short on Netflix, balances these simple scenes of love and loss in its small-scale look at the daily instability following a massive disaster – in this case, of Hurricane Maria, which devastated the island of Puerto Rico in September 2017. The film, directed by Nadia Hallgren and produced by Lauren Cioffi, quietly portrays the daily toll of destabilization after the nation’s second-deadliest hurricane decimated the island’s infrastructure, specifically for the more than 300,000 islanders who fled to mainland America. Most specifically, for those who fled to Fema-assisted housing in Hallgren’s hometown, the Bronx.
In a tight 37 minutes, After Maria acknowledges the larger fabric of the tragedy – condescension from the Trump administration, indifference from federal aid agencies, the indignity of a death toll thousands higher than officially acknowledged – while hewing closely to the ground, seeing the disaster and its slow, paralyzing aftermath through the eyes of those buffeted by the storm. As day-by-day cinéma vérité, it’s less dispiriting than straight up, a portrait of clammy, constant anxiety peppered with daily joy, welfare calls with birthday parties.
Part of that balance, Hallgren says, comes from seeing the Maria refugees as the latest chapter in a long history of Puerto Rican migration. “This is not the first wave of Puerto Rican migration to the Bronx and to New York City and to the mainland United States,” said Hallgren, herself a “Nuyorican” whose grandmother moved from the island to the Bronx, in a recent interview. “This was just another way to illustrate what that migration looks like.”
Hallgren recalled that she was in Los Angeles, reading coverage of her home borough and its influx of displaced islanders, when she saw an opportunity to tell the ongoing story of Puerto Rican migration – a story of loss and forgotten Americans, but also of resilience and community. She and Cioffi found a list of Fema-supported hotels in the Bronx, connected with their “amazing fixer”, a community organizer working with Maria refugees, and began going room to room, meeting about 50 families. Selecting the subjects for the film was not just a matter of “what we knew would be a wonderful story”, says Hallgren, but also finding “the women in the film who were willing to give us the most time, because they all understood how important it was to tell their story.”
That story comes to life through the day-to-day coping of three matriarchs: Glenda, Kenia and Sheila, and most movingly through Kenia’s pre-teen daughter Nilda, a reluctant climate refugee. Hallgren’s camera follows the families, now close friends, as they fight for stability in a new city – as a haunted Nilda, bullied at a new school, hides under her headphones, as Glenda navigates Section 8 call lists in vain, and as Sheila preaches taking it all one day at a time.
After Maria predominantly captures the month before Fema’s deadline for housing assistance in the Bronx hotel expired, leaving the families in a demoralizing lurch, alone in a tough rental market even for experienced New Yorkers. The difficulty of their situation was “just ever-present, even from the first few minutes of meeting with them – the impossibility of just meeting basic needs was there right away,” Cioffi recalled, yet “it was amazing to see how much daily joy they had as a community and as a family network. They would find ways to create joy for themselves.”
There was joy found in Glenda’s celebration, in doing Nilda’s hair for her own party, in dancing – moments Hallgren and Cioffi filmed as they integrated into their subjects’ lives, even temporarily moving into a hotel room on the same floor.
“We filmed as much as we possibly could,” said Hallgren. “There were times where we were definitely just hanging out but always having the camera at hand for moments that we knew would add to the story, whether it was having a meal together or a conversation.” The families were especially welcoming, she said, because it seemed unusual that “we would care so much about their whole story and their whole lives – who they were before the storm happened and what’s happened after, the investment in them long-term, and the hope that things do get better for them.”
In turn, both Hallgren and Cioffi said they were determined to capture the destabilizing no man’s land wrought by Maria and national indifference to its victims – facing the end of Fema assistance in New York or a one-way ticket back to a crippled Puerto Rico, each family was caught between a rock and a hard place. “They couldn’t go back to Puerto Rico, because Puerto Rico was uninhabitable, but then they couldn’t stay in New York because it was too expensive and they weren’t getting the resources,” said Hallgren.
“For us, it was really important that the nuances of being backed up against the wall in both places.”
By the end of the film, all three families remained without permanent housing in New York – a perpetuation of instability, just as the government emergency response to Maria lagged behind that of other hurricanes, just as the official death toll, now over 3,000, acknowledged reality incrementally. Both Hallgren and Cioffi said they see their film’s story, and the larger amnesia over Hurricane Maria, as indicative of a larger issue. “Puerto Rico is still a colony of the US, and I think people are still very unaware of that relationship,” said Cioffi. “We hope that this film will help illuminate that.”
After Maria is available on Netflix on 24 May
