Visions du Réel 2026: Guided Tour (dir. Alba Jaramillo) | Review
Guided Tour deftly depicts, with both narrative and formal ingenuity, a very real curse: the one left behind by those who once seized control of the Puerto Rican island of Zuania, and whose traces have never disappeared.
In Guided Tour, a short film premiering at Visions du Réel 2026, Alba Jaramillo crafts an intimate, political portrait of the island of Zuania, in the Puerto Rican archipelago, as one might probe a wound that refuses to heal. The small island reveals itself in a striking, unsettling light—bathed in an unusual red glow meant not to disturb sea turtles as they lay their eggs along its shores. This red filter evokes, almost metaphorically, a laboratory island, a threatened island, a mysterious island. It leaves the impression that something is off, that reality itself has been slightly displaced.
Here, nothing quite seems in its place—yet everything appears to have settled in regardless. Like the wild horses that roam the island, as if wondering, much like the humans they live alongside, what they are doing here at all. Brought by Spanish colonizers, they remained, and continue to share the land. Only in part, however: an entire section of the island is still restricted. The reason lies in severe environmental contamination caused by the various weapons tests conducted there by the United States during the Cold War. After six decades of occupation, the U.S. military withdrew, leaving its imprint on this stretch of land.
At the heart of this hybrid work—blending staged scenes with documentary voices—is Beatriz, an independent tour guide who captures a share of the steady stream of tourists to make ends meet. Her economic struggles, and the broader weight shaping island life, are not the concerns of those visitors. The island depends on this flow—an invisible mass announced from the outset by an off-screen voice over a tourist boat’s loudspeakers—yet it cannot free itself from it. Beatriz embodies a contradiction: she helps shape the narrative presented to tourists while remaining acutely aware of its blind spots. The island relies on this external gaze, which overlays its landscapes with a softened vision while ignoring—or choosing to ignore—what lies beneath.
But guiding visitors through mangroves is not enough to pay the rent, and sometimes Beatriz must accommodate more curious tourists, even when it means approaching what still poisons the land.
The film makes a deeply political statement. It shows how an island can be successively imposed upon, exploited, and abandoned—horses, military bases, tourists—without ever restoring to its inhabitants the power to decide for themselves. More importantly, Jaramillo reminds us that these incursions do not simply replace one another: they accumulate, sediment, and persist.
Straddling science fiction, intimate storytelling, and documentary observation, Guided Tour portrays an ambiguous space where the beauty of the landscape cannot quite conceal what haunts it—a very real curse left behind by those who departed, but whose traces remain.
Explore our coverage of the 57th edition of Visions du Réel here.
