Puerto Rican Filmmaker Indebted to Libraries, Archives

Puerto Rican filmmaker Luis Molina-Casanova.

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Luis Molina-Casanova, filmmaker and professor in the communications department of Sacred Heart University in San Juan, was the last plenary speaker at the 77th World Library and Information Congress of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions today in Puerto Rico.

Molina-Casanova said he is writing a book about his 30-year love affair with filmmaking. He has devoted his life to making educational films because of what he has discovered in libraries and archives—things he was never taught in school or saw on television and that were not in his textbooks.

“I can never be too grateful to the keepers of our cultural heritage,” Molina-Casanova said. When he is asked if libraries will survive the digital revolution, he replied, “Books are not disappearing, they are in the process of transformation. The same is true of libraries.” He said the film industry has also been revolutionized by digital technology.

The library is a source of creativity for educators, artists, writers, musicians, and countless others, Molina-Casanova said, and they “will always have the same function, dedicated to the preservation and conservation of the record; it is what we have been and what we will be. In film, I show in a graphic way the information we get from you … to synthesize and distribute to the masses. It keeps the flow of information alive from you to us and from us to you.”

Molina-Casanova ended his program by showing samples from some of his 50 films that demonstrate the use of historical images and how, among other things, still photos are “animated” in documentary films by panning and zooming. He left the audience laughing with scenes from his film El Sueno del Regreso, the story of 10 Puerto Ricans in New York who get the opportunity to return to the island they hail from.