Melting Snow
ABOUT
In 1952, the mayor of San Juan, Felisa Rincon de Gautier, partnered with the now defunct U.S. carrier Eastern Airlines to transport two tons of snow from New Hampshire to Puerto Rico. The snow was a gift to the island meant to enchant Puerto Rican children with a “white” American Christmas. The spectacle represented an unfair economic transaction: planes brought capitalist instant gratification in the form of snow, and returned to the U.S. filled with the Puerto Rican cheap labor that would populate el barrio. Puerto Rico’s colonial captivity is condensed in the “gift” of melting snow. Melting Snow is a dig into the past, an act of media archeology, contextualizing the filmmaker's Grandparents' experiences to make sense of the present and examine the way American narratives are told, and often warped. As our world crumbles and restructures, Melting Snow forces a reckoning of the motivations and politics behind the United States' relationship to the island and the anomaly of the oldest colony in the world.
I am a Nuyorican documentary director and editor from the Bronx. My previous editorial work has premiered at Cannes, Berlinale, Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca, and NYFF, among others. I was recently the editor of ""The Color of Care,"" a feature documentary directed by Yance Ford, which premiered on the Smithsonian Channel in April 2022. I have a BA in Globalization Studies with a focus in Latin America from SUNY Albany and was a 2019 Karen Schmeer Diversity in the Edit Room Fellow. My directorial work examines forgotten Latin American history to contextualize our entrenched social hierarchy beyond the current debate over race and gender, placing these stories in the broader understanding of how the notion of class is woven into our collective fabric. My directorial debut, ""Melting Snow,"" a short documentary about the coloniality of Puerto Rico's labor, was generously supported by North Shorts, IF/Then, and Field of Vision. It was nominated for Best Experimental Short at BlackStar Film Festival and premiered on the Criterion Collection in May 2022. *** Janah Elise is a Nuyorican documentary director and editor from the Bronx, NY. Her previous editorial work has premiered at Cannes, Berlinale, Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca and New York film festivals, among others. She was recently the editor of Bad Hombres, a feature documentary premiering on Showtime in October 2020, and has worked on award-winning films including The King, Mr. Soul!, 93Queen and Get Me Roger Stone! She holds a BA in Globalization Studies with a focus in Latin America from SUNY Albany, was a 2019 Karen Schmeer Diversity in the Edit Room Fellow, a 2020 IF/Then North Shorts grant recipient and 2021 EnFoco Inc. grantee. She is currently editing an untitled feature documentary directed by Yance Ford. Melting Snow is her directorial debut.
CREDITS
Sue Ariza