Sofía Gallisá
Muriente
Muriente
Exhibitions
Publications
Films
Un montón de silencios
DIRECTED AND SHOT BY
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
2024
DIRECTED AND SHOT BY
4K video with 16mm, Super 8
and 120 film elements
SYNOPSIS
A Bundle of Silences is an experimental documentary that circles around the 1983 Águila Blanca heist, when the Puerto Rican clandestine pro-independence group Los Macheteros expropriated $7 million from a Wells Fargo depot in Hartford, Connecticut. At its center are two figures who remain out of reach: Víctor Gerena, the Puerto Rican employee who carried out the robbery and vanished beyond the FBI’s grasp, and his mother, Gloria Gerena, a community organizer, social worker and advocate for bilingual education who passed away in 2022.
Through fragments of testimony, archival textures, and images processed with tobacco leaves and coffee, the film situates their story within a longer history of Puerto Rican migration to New England’s tobacco fields. This landscape becomes a poetic archive, one that resists visibility yet carries memory.
Departing from an interview between the filmmaker’s father, a pro-independence leader, and convicted participant Juan Segarra Palmer, the film weaves in recollections from Gloria’s friends and fellow organizers. What emerges is less a definitive account than a meditation on absence, the limits of documentary form, and the silences that continue to shape how this history can be remembered.