point of contact

DOSSIER 2006
The official online publication of the
Syracuse International Film Festival, Vol.3
A Point of Contact Production

CAYO, Puerto Rico
Vicente Juarbe, Director
Official Cayo Website

Ivan, a Puerto Rican living in New York, is dying of cancer. With his lifelong love and wife, Julia, he returns to his native land. Here in the tropic landscape of their shared childhood, Ivan and Julia succumb to the comfort of nostalgia…until haunting memories and unsettling change make one thing clear: the past is always present. Only the cayo – the place where Ivan came of age – remains constant. This is the ever-seductive cayo (key), lush land beneath his feet that grounds him and never betrays. It is the portal to that space where there is something to live for.

In this deeply felt and well-realized reflection upon life and loss, purpose and place, Director Carlos Ruiz takes the viewer through cinematic byways of remembrance. Cayo a visual and emotional tour of love in many guises: unrequited, stolen, and stalwart. Seamlessly blending camera, art direction, and music, the film defines time and place by means of carefully considered imagery. New York Hospital corridors are as steely gray as the cutting words of a dreaded prognosis. Wartime scenes are saturated it jungle green, broken by startling splashes of blood red. Here is a landscape where color melds the terrain between memory and reality. A foggy inner land is fertile ground for secrets hidden and revealed. Childhood memories are light and palpable. Music, too, reflects the geographic and emotional truths of the main characters. Always there is the shining sea and bright sun of Puerto Rico, casting light on unavoidable truths. Home, where “everything is brighter…even on cloudy days,” says Julia.