(Partner Event) El taller de Naldi / Naldi’s Workshop

Film screening at the International Puerto Rican Heritage Film Festival on November 17th, 2024 at 2:00 PM. Logline: An octogenarian folk-artist uses his paintings to recount Puerto Rican family and life histories to his grandson. A film by Carlos Rivera Fernandez and Arnaldo Fernandez Cruz Produced by Películas Viejas Productions for the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology El Taller de Naldi is a journey that chronicles a visual history of Puerto Rico, inspired by the paintings of Arnaldo Fernandez Cruz, an octogenarian folk artist. Together with his grandson, filmmaker Carlos, this painter and director pair become the authors of a narrative that shines a perennial, memorial light on Arnaldo’s hometown of Cupey. Through a series of testimonies, ranging from hilarious epithets of his rural youth to unsettling histories from Puerto Rico’s colonial past, the film captures the essence of the place and its people. Simultaneously, Arnaldo and Carlos collaborate in a reciprocal creative process, engaging deeply with each other’s work. By mixing historiography and folklore with an experimental approach to the artist’s craft, El Taller de Naldi is at once a meditation on the role of art in preserving a national memory, and an intimate portrait of the personal relationship between a grandfather and his grandson.