When night falls in the Puerto Rican countryside, a group of women enter an open field, holding candles in their hands, as masked white-robed figures dance hypnotically in the darkness — a woman whispers, “You’ll set your stories free. Fear will cease to exist.”

What seems like a hallucinatory fever dream is actually part of an overarching creative and filmic exercise run by a multi-generational family of outspoken Puerto Rican women. The Villanueva women convene to “air out” personal memories about their generational trauma and cycles of abuse by the men in their lives — all while these tumultuous recollections take the form of fantastical filmic sequences that the women perform and enact, in a therapeutic fashion. Grandmother Idaliz Villanueva describes the first time she experienced physical abuse at the hands of her husband, a moment of shock to her. As Idaliz’s honest testimonies unfold, we see the Villanueva women inhabit warrior-like personas while the men are represented as gas mask-wearing invasive marauders, intruding on the enveloping natural landscape that the women reside in.

Atmospheric and sensorial in equal measure, Gabriela Díaz Arp’s highly confident and bold first feature presents a formally-distinctive vision on oppressive patriarchal systems and forms of liberation.—Jose Rodriguez