Rafaela is the second film in the three-part series Caribbean Eye: Auteur Cinema from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Caribbean Eye is part of the 2024 Fotofocus Biennial: backstories. The biennial theme, backstories, focuses on stories that are not evident at first glance. They offer context for what happened previously or out of view, providing narratives not yet told or presented from a new perspective. Once told, they shed light on current circumstances and events.
About Rafaela:
Rafaela is a young girl from a dangerous neighborhood of Santo Domingo, who lives within a dysfunctional family, and dreams about moving to a better place with her mother. When she grows up, she becomes the leader of a criminal gang that “Mario el Mago”, a known drug dealer of the neighborhood, wants to force to work for him. Rafaela is constantly intimidated for being a woman they consider transgender, and that they can’t understand. And while the world around her gets more violent, she fights to find her identity.
About Caribbean Eye:
The Caribbean is the site of a dynamic new emerging film culture. In the last decade or so, Caribbean films by an exciting new generation of filmmakers have been winning prizes at international film festivals, finding more distribution than ever before, and surprising viewers around the world with stories that are new for international audiences. The films in the series Caribbean Eye: Auteur Cinema from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic tell stories we may not have not heard, and are set in places we may think we know but may not have really seen, using fresh approaches that will leave viewers with new images of the Caribbean and new ideas to think about.