News

Glorimar Marrero Sánchez’s The Fishbowl unfolds against the lush yet scarred backdrop of Puerto Rico, tracing the final chapter of Noelia (Isel Rodríguez), a forty-year-old artist confronting terminal cancer. After a tense sunrise scene in her San Juan apartment—where a daydream in the bathtub yields to the stark reality of blood seeping from her colostomy bag—Noelia makes a decisive pivot: she will spend her remaining days on Vieques, the island of her birth.

Sánchez adopts a reflective rhythm, allowing each shot of Noelia’s journey across emerald seas and through bioluminescent bays to accumulate emotional weight. The film’s tone is hushed yet insistent, balancing quiet moments of family warmth with the undercurrent of political grievance.

As Noelia moves through crowded kitchens, protest encampments and moonlit beaches, the narrative weaves her personal reckoning with the legacy of military contamination. From the first frame to the ferry’s wake,...

Exclusive: Monument Releasing has acquired North American theatrical rights to Puerto Rican ecofeminist drama The Fishbowl (La Pecera), which recently debuted at the Sundance Film Festival.

The debut of writer-director Glorimar Marrero Sánchez is set to debut in U.S. theaters in March 2025, coinciding with Puerto Rican Emancipation Day on March 21. A streaming release will follow on May 21, 2025.

The Spanish-language film is one of only a few Puerto Rican-produced features to ever premiere at Sundance.

Set on the island of Vieques—a U.S. military testing ground for toxic munitions like napalm, depleted uranium, and Agent Orange—The Fishbowl tells the story of Noelia (Isel Rodríguez), a 40-year-old artist grappling with terminal cancer. Determined to use her remaining time resisting the ecological and social consequences of U.S. colonialism, Noelia’s journey unfolds as both a personal and collective act of resilience.

After discovering her cancer has returned and metastasized,...

A body and an island become sites of resistance in Glorimar Marrero Sánchez’s The Fishbowl, a fitfully incendiary, entrancing portrait of a woman engaged in a two-front war. Her name’s Noelia (Isel Rodríguez), a thirty-something Puerto Rican artist living in San Juan with her partner Jorge (Maximiliano Rivas). At the outset we’re told Noelia’s had cancer, and now that the illness has returned she refuses treatment to seek refuge in her native island of Vieques, a 40-minute ferry ride from the capital. What we aren’t told, but the film persuasively suggests, is that her disease might have been caused by the toxic emissions left by six decades’ worth of American weapons testing on her home turf. Written by Marrero Sánchez, The Fishbowl mines an unsealed wound in the US territory’s history; as The Atlantic grimly revealed in a 2016 exposé, cancer rates in Vieques are...

Spain’s Solita Films and Auna Producciones, and Puerto Rico’s Canica Films, the production team behind Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition entry “La Pecera” (“The Fishbowl”), by Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, is joining again for the Puerto Rican filmmaker’s new feature, “El Grito de la Trinitaria.”

Written and directed by Marrero Sánchez, “El Grito de la Trinitaria” (a working title) follows a Dominican woman searching for her own space in the world and the elderly woman in whose house she lives, when they are about to lose the apartment they have shared for years.

The project replicates “La Pecera’s” Spain-Puerto Rico production partnership, with Solita co-founder José Esteban Alenda, Auna’s Amaya Izquierdo and Canica’s Marrero Sánchez serving as producers.

“The search for my own space rolls off my interest, as a Puerto Rican, to address the human need for self-determination,” Marrero told Variety.

“This time,...

The drama is the feature debut of Puerto Rican filmmaker Glorimar Marrero Sanchez.

New York-based sales company Visit Films has signed on to represent worldwide rights for Puerto Rican drama The Fishbowl (La Pecera), which is set to get its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at this month’s Sundance Film Festival.

The film, the feature debut of Puerto Rican filmmaker, screenwriter and interdisciplinary artist Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, tells the story of an artist who, when her cancer metastasizes, returns to the small Puerto Rican island where she grew up and throws herself into denouncing the pollution...

The drama is the feature debut of Puerto Rican filmmaker Glorimar Marrero Sanchez.

New York-based sales company Visit Films has signed on to represent worldwide rights for Puerto Rican drama The Fishbowl (La Pecera), which is set to get its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at this month’s Sundance Film Festival.

The film, the feature debut of Puerto Rican filmmaker, screenwriter and interdisciplinary artist Glorimar Marrero Sánchez, tells the story of an artist who, when her cancer metastasizes, returns to the small Puerto Rican island where she grew up and throws herself into denouncing the pollution...