News from Home

Sweeping scenes of Costa Rica from “El Retorno” (The Return), the country’s first fiction film, are confronted with a contemporary oral narration from a Costa Rican migrant in Spain. The voice reads the letters of Juan Vasquez de Coronado, the Spanish conqueror of Costa Rica during the Spanish colonization.

A palimpsest that reflects on the complexities of migration, historical memory, and the negotiation of cultural identities.

Documentary short film. Costa Rica/Spain, 2025.

07 min, black and white.

CREW

Direction, script and editing: Joel Jimenez

Narration: Joel Jimenez

Sound: Marti Albert

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

How does migration alter our sense of identity, sense of placelessness or presence? After migrating from Costa Rica to Spain, I began to question my sense of belonging while I was struggling to find mechanisms to accommodate myself in a new land and to identify the vestiges of home within me.

This re/dislocation confronted me with a process of critical revision to understand the plurality of social and cultural backdrops related to the historical construction of my identity, in which migration, hybridization, and colonization are key factors.

This film is a confrontation of origins: images of Costa Rica in the 1920s from “El Retorno” (1930), the first fiction film produced in the country’s history; letters from Juan Vasquez de Coronado, the Spanish conqueror of Costa Rica; and my voice, a Costa Rican immigrant settling in Spain.

Through the intertextuality of referencing and rereading Chantal Akerman’s work (News from Home, 1977), the short film engages with explorations of displacement, estrangement, geographical and temporal distance, and dwelling.

At the same time, reactivating the letters from Juan Vasquez de Coronado sent to King Phillip II (1563), allows for a reflection on the echoes of the colonial past that still linger in current embodied experiences of identity, and to engage with origin and history as interconnected concepts that are continually rewritten, where the past and present engage in a complex and ongoing dialogue.

The convergence of historical, colonial, and contemporary elements in the film points to a cultural hybridity, reflecting the complex indeterminacy of cultural identities shaped by migration and historical legacies.

Ultimately, the film invites viewers to reflect on the intricate relationships between time, place, and identity, prompting contemplation on the complexities of migration, historical memory, and the constant negotiation between different temporal and cultural contexts.