Visually evocative and uniquely conceived, Cristian Carretero and Lorraine Jones’s “Esta Isla” (“This Island”) is a lovers-on-the-run narrative unafraid to pause for emotional and thematic effect. The Puerto Rico-set film received a special jury mention and director and cinematography honors in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Narrative Feature competition in 2025. It later received the John Cassavetes Award at the 2026 Film Independent Spirit Awards.
This small splendor of intimate filmmaking initially concerns two fishermen brothers—Bebo (Zion Ortiz) and Charlie (Xavier Antonio Morales)—whose smuggling side hustle earns the ire of local gangster Moreno (Audicio Robles). Surrounding this testy dynamic are significant questions about colonialism, poverty, community, and grief, whose every answer inspires a stirring string of memories meant to heal these protagonists’ psychological pains.
From the opening image of Charlie dancing at night around a bonfire on a vacant beach, we think this film will be exclusively about destruction. As “Esta Isla” wears on, our assumptions are not disputed either. Every day, Charlie, Bebo, and a third friend lug their reels, nets, and bait onto a motorboat. And every week, no matter the catch, the restaurant where they sell their fish gives them less and less money for their efforts. This week, Bebo learns his horse is sick and needs penicillin. He goes to Moreno for assistance, who, in turn, employs Bebo as a weed dealer. Bebo begins frequenting parties, selling to people like Lola (Fabiola Victoria Brown), who grows romantically close to Bebo.
Charlie, however, has a bitter history with Moreno. He doesn’t want to see his younger brother Bebo become immersed in the gangster lifestyle. Charlie’s anger leads to a heated confrontation with Moreno that’ll have dire consequences for both brothers, especially because Charlie has been dealing behind Moreno’s back to provide money for Charlie and Bebo’s grandmother, Aida (Georgina Borri). The latter, who lives in a picturesque home topped by a proudly waving Puerto Rican flag, would rather not accept Charlie’s money. She dreams of the brothers’ deceased mother and worries about where the siblings are heading.
When tragedy inevitably strikes, it’s Bebo who flees with Lola toward a home formerly owned by her dead father. But instead of this film becoming a shoot ’em’ action-thriller, Carretero and Jones opt for a more subdued pace. Upon Bebo’s beat-up red corolla breaking down, Cora (Teofilo Torres), a local farmer, takes them in and allows them to work on his plantain field for the season.
This narrative slowdown allows for this sensitive script to become character-based rather than event-driven. Frank conversations between Bebo, Lola, and other workers inspire firm observations about the steep price heaped on Puerto Rico for being a US territory, like Lola’s father serving in the Iraq War, only to return home with PTSD so debilitating that it would make him a target of the FBI. There is also the loss of community farming, in which money was unnecessary because growers shared their crops with one another. Bebo and Lola’s time on the field, therefore, offers an Edenic vision of what Puerto Rico could be away from the income inequality and systemic divestment caused by an imperial power like America.
Tellingly, cinematographer Cedric Cheung-Lau shoots Puerto Rico’s verdant rainforests and vast beaches not with the gleam of a vacation destination but with the responsiveness of someone tapped into the soulful beauty a place can instill in its people. That groundedness counterbalances the rhythmic intensity of a narrative built on the meaning hidden behind dreams and memories. Both items reveal much about Bebo and Lola, particularly the divergent prospects for a modest fisherman and a former ballerina. And while the film does well to show how both are trapped in their own respective hells, the opacity of their relationship can sometimes dilute their motivations.
It’s easy to look past the film’s murkiness because one knows it’s consciously trying not to deliver easy answers. Carretero and Jones may cut to Moreno roving around the island trying to locate the young lovers, but the narrative doesn’t become about the hunt. We are inundated with glimpses of violence, but the film never becomes cheap. In fact, one of its most beautiful sequences is a funeral held in crystal-blue waters amid a fleet of motorboats. “Esta Isla” instead trusts its audience to read images and its actors to translate those images into earned emotions. On the latter count, Ortiz and Brown are intelligent and unhurried. Both transmit a lifetime of baggage through their physicality rather than needing to speak it into existence. They, like “Esta Isla,” are a strong, committed island in a sea of heartache.
