Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Join us for an evening of cinematic viewing with Ramón Rivera Moret’s extraordinary film, Todo Parecía Posible (Everything Seemed Possible).

Drawing from a remarkable archive and body of films produced by Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education, Todo parecía posible revisits moving-image work made in rural communities from the late 1940s through the 1960s—a period of sweeping economic, industrial, and ideological transformation on the island. 

Created under a government commission yet animated by a striking creative independence, these films quietly resist the dominant narratives of modernization, favoring instead experimentation, poetic inquiry, and forms of address rooted in everyday life.

The unit behind this work included some of Puerto Rico’s earliest and most prolific filmmakers, among them Amílcar Tirado and Benjamín Doniger, whose films reveal a cinema deeply attuned to labor, education, and collective imagination.

Rivera Moret approaches this archive not as a closed historical document, but as a living record. Interweaving these rarely seen works with intimate reflections on his own family’s history, the film becomes a meditation on inheritance, authorship, and the afterlives of images—how cinema travels across generations, and how the past continues to press upon the present.

As curator John Hanhardt writes, the film is “an essential record of an important chapter in film history and the economic and ideological forces impacting Puerto Rican society.” 

We’re honored to welcome Ramón Rivera Moret for a post-screening conversation on the making of the film, the complexities of working with institutional and community archives, and the delicate work of weaving historical materials with personal memory.

Come spend the evening with us and in Rivera Moret’s carefully crafted cinematic space and in conversation together.

Program

Todo parecía posible by Ramon Rivera-Moret

105 mins, 2025

In the midst of the Cold War, Puerto Rico was rapidly industrializing and aligning itself with U.S. interests. Seeking to shape the narrative of a modernized country, the government sent a group of artists into rural communities to make films about the country’s new direction. But what emerged was something far more unexpected. In close collaboration with residents, these artists created dozens of films that gained international recognition— works that powerfully questioned the official story of progress.

Filmmaker Ramón Rivera Moret weaves the stories of these remarkable films with the memories of his own family, crafting an intimate portrait of the filmmakers, their collaborations, and a moment in Puerto Rico marked by profound political and social transformation and the desire to imagine the country anew.

Todo parecía posible was produced by Oren Rudavsky, co-produced by Tal Mandil, with music by Ileana Cabra and Ismael Cancel. It has screened at Rotterdam International Film Festival, Netherlands; 19th CinemaBH International Film Festival, Brazil, The Barbican, London; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museo Arte
Contemporáneo, San Juan. The film support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities was sponsored by New York Founation for the Arts.

Program Duration: 105 mins

Bios

Ramón Rivera-Moret’s practice engages an experimental approach to storytelling, bringing together a multiplicity of stories and situations through a mixture of narrative strategies. He is interested in ways to construct cinematic stories beyond traditional paradigms – including the abstract, the fragment and the small gesture – within an open ended, non-linear narrative.

His work—often developed through long-term collaborations with communities—spans film, installation, and site-specific projection. His projects include La dirección del cielo, a series tracing astronomical traditions across the Americas; The Ordinal Directions, a four-channel video installation recorded over a year in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, whose forward momentum comes from the flow of time and space as it unfolds through a cascade of encounters; On Calloway Street, a feature weaving together the lives of immigrants sharing an apartment building in Queens; Chishimo: A Lunda Story, which follows the life of a traditional African doctor in northwest Zambia; and Eyes Upside Down, site-specific, outdoor projections of the night sky.

His work has been exhibited at The Barbican, London; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Anthology Film Archives; Millennium Film Workshop; the Queens Museum of Art; the Birmingham Museum of Art; the American Museum of Natural History; Chicago Filmmakers; Amherst College; Hampshire College; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, San Juan, as well as numerous international film festivals.

He has received support from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, the Puerto Rico Film Development Fund, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rivera Moret is an Associate Professor in the Film/Animation/Video Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Prior to joining RISD, he taught at Pratt Institute in New York and Amherst College.

He was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and is based in New York.

Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer is a Mexican-American film critic, editor, and film programmer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently the managing director at Le Cinéma Club and managing editor at Screen Slate. His writing has appeared in Film Comment, Reverse Shot, and Notebook.