The Empty Sign

El signo vacío (The Empty Sign) is a feature-length anthropological journey through the United States’ occupation of Puerto Rico. Mixing over a hundred years of found footage – tourism, agricultural, and propaganda films – with contemporary portraits of local artists and activists and Puerto Rican punk rock/noise music, the film reveals how carefully crafted American fictions of “democracy” and “debt” obscure a capitalist and military domination that is ongoing. Moving between old and new, Spanish and English, between paradise and environmental destruction, the El signo vacío becomes a “re-educational” film, challenging the viewer to rethink modern colonisation, its mechanisms, and responsibilities.