Official Trailer for ‘Esta Isla’ Award-Winning Puerto Rican Indie Film​

“We fought for something different on this island.” Tribeca Films is releasing this indie creation titled Esta Isla for release on VOD soon – the title translates from Spanish to This Island in English. It premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival last year before playing in limited theaters in March this year. It also won the prestigious John Cassavetes Award at the Indie Spirit Awards earlier this year, the first-ever Puerto Rican film to ever win any Spirit Award. Young lovers Bebo and Lola, from different social worlds in Puerto Rico, escape to a remote area of the island after a murder occurs. Esta Isla explores themes of identity, memory, and belonging in an island community and is now a landmark of contemporary Boricua cinema. Starring Zion Ortiz, Fabiola Brown, Teofilo Torres, Xavier Morales, Audicio Robles & Georgina Borri. If you’re intrigued, you can catch up with it on VOD soon. Tribeca explains: “With grounded performances & striking cinematography, Jones and Carretero’s confident first feature is a potent exploration of wayward youth seeking a better future for themselves amidst their precarious present.” It looks like a powerful debut.

Here’s the official trailer for Cristian Carretero & Lorraine Jones Molina’s film Esta Isla, from YouTube:

Bebo (Zion Ortíz) is a teenager living in a coastal public housing complex, trying to make ends meet as a fisherman, but gets dragged into dangerous, illegal dealings to survive. After a drug deal goes wrong and leads to tragic violence, Bebo decides to flee with Lola (Fabiola Brown), a young woman from a wealthier background looking to escape her own suffocating reality. As they begint o navigate the island’s untamed mountains, encountering the remnants of a fading way of life and meeting people living outside capitalist pressures, will they be able to outrun the hitmen pursuing them? Esta Isla is co-directed by Puerto Rican filmmakers Cristian Carretero & Lorraine Jones Molina, both directors of the doc Semillas, Crónicas de la Tierra: Seeds, Chronicles of the Earth previously, and a few other shorts. The screenplay is written by Lorraine Jones Molina, Cristian Carretero, and Kisha Tikina Burgos. Produced by Lorraine Jones Molina & Cristian Carretero. This initially premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival last year and it already opened in US theaters in March 2026 earlier in the year. It’s releasing soon to watch on VOD as well. Look good?

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