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million-Dollar eConomiC impaCt of ‘the plane’
New Film Project Represents Economic Impact of $163 Million
Direct investment of $65.7 million to film ‘The Plane’ on the island
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The Weekly Journal Staff
The production and filming of “The Plane,” an action film starring Scottish actor Gerard Butler, represents a direct investment in Puerto Rico of $65.7 million and an economic impact of $136 million with the estimated occupation of 3,964 hotel room nights. The news was shared by Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, who revealed details of this upcoming production alongside Butler and the secretary of the
Department of Economic Development and
Commerce (DDEC by its Spanish acronym), Manuel
Cidre, at a press conference in the Pedrín Zorrilla
Coliseum in San Juan. As part of the plot, Butler plays commercial pilot Ray Torrance, who, after successfully landing his plane in hostile territory, must face a hostagetaking scenario. The actor is known for such movies as “300” and the trio of “Fallen” movies, such as “Olympus has Fallen.” “This project, which uses scenarios in Ceiba, Río
Grande and San Juan for its filming, employs some 500 Puerto Rican workers - including technicians, actors and production personnel - generating a payroll of more than $5.1 million with a fiscal impact of over $450,000 in withheld income taxes.
During the four months of the project’s filming on the island, nearly 4,000 room nights will be used, achieving an economic impact of $136 million, an amount much greater than the investment made by the government to grant under Act 60 of 2019 with $26 million in tax credits,” said Pierluisi, who has promised to reiterate before the Financial
Oversight and Management Board the benefits of increasing these credits for the film industry to foster job creation and economic development on the island. For his part, Cidre explained that the team of the DDEC’s Film Industry Development Program
“carefully analyzes the proposals that are received and selects those projects that provide the best performance for Puerto Rico. All the incentives available through the Incentive Code, including those for the film and creative industries, are granted based on the investment represented by the project submitted for evaluation and their return on investment, among other criteria.” Moreover, the secretary underscored that every concessionaire who has been granted a decree for eligible film projects under the Incentive Code will only receive the tax credits after submitting an audit, prepared by a certified public accountant (CPA) in Puerto Rico, in which the expenses incurred are confirmed. The audit is evaluated and the expenses are validated by both the DDEC and the local Treasury Department in order to certify the tax credits to which the concessionaire is entitled. It was also reported that this project generates expenses of $19 million for the employees who have come to work on the island. These payments receive 20 percent in tax incentives, subject to a withholding of 20 percent with an automatic impact of $3.8 million that is paid to the Puerto Rico Treasury Department “The Plane” is produced by Marc Butan, Alan Siegel, Lorenzo Di Bonaventura, with Puerto Rican producer Luillo Ruiz, and directed by JeanFrancois Richet. At the end of the summer, Pierluisi announced that after the filming on the island of “Fantasy Island,” a drama series set in the 1970s and 1980s that premiered in August on the Fox television network, the economic impact was over $54.7 million. In addition, 418 direct jobs were created and the hotel occupancy was estimated at more than 2,000 nights for the entire production team, actors and staff.
From left, Gerard Butler, DDEC Secretary Manuel Cidre and Gov. Pedro Pierluisi convene to share details on the Scottish actor’s new movie. >Josian E. Bruno Gómez
Renée Landell
Researcher in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Royal Holloway University of London
Why We Need to Stop Thinking of the Caribbean as a Tourist ‘Paradise’
Descriptions of the Caribbean have long reduced the region to the luring trinity of sun, sea and sand in order to market it as the ideal holiday destination. The splendour of its rainforests and the aquatic hues of its coral reefs are undeniably beautiful.
But Caribbean islands are also home to people, animals and other non-human species whose complex histories have been shaped by exploitative tourism.
In the west, the idea of a “paradise lost”, as popularized by Milton’s famous epic poem telling the story of Adam and Eve, gave rise to a hunt for “undiscovered” Edens still present on Earth.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World, the appeal of an earthly paradise was at its zenith in Europe. Setting out with the intention of reaching East Asia to establish more effective intercontinental trade routes – as well as to spread Catholicism – Columbus seemed to be taking his cue from the Bible, whose Book of Genesis describes the garden of paradise as being planted “eastward in Eden”. But when Columbus first set foot on what was in fact a Caribbean beach, the natural landscape presented another, secular prize: the promise of infinite riches from the natural world.
Sure enough, the increasing hype in the west around the search for paradise became less about pleasing God and more about greed for travelers like Columbus, as evidenced by colonizers’ exploitation of indigenous people and extraction of wealth from natural and biological resources.
The Neocolonial Paradise
The seductive modern image of paradise, with its golden sands and crystal waters, evolved as part of a neo-colonial project of tourism, as the flow of foreign power was being reimagined in the wake of the collapse of European empires.
From travel brochures to television advertisements, the tourism industry presents the unethical idea that paradise can be bought just like any other commodity.
The myth of paradise has turned the Caribbean region into a space open to invasion by the highest bidder. Westerners are encouraged to escape from the monotony of everyday life to be serviced at the hands of labourers – a dangerous echo of life on the plantation for enslaved African people.
Poetry as Protest and Resistance
Many contemporary Caribbean writers discuss some of the Caribbean’s most urgent environmental and social concerns, including exploitative tourism, dwindling local land rights and underpaid citizen labour. Jamaica Kincaid, Michele Cliff and others have likened tourism to a renewed version of colonialism. For me, the most striking writing on the Caribbean environment comes from the St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott.
Walcott, in his poem “Midsummer XXVII”, describes how nature in Trinidad has been “replaced or modified” by the “grey, metal light” of technology. Under the joint influences of colonialism and extractive capitalism affecting the islands, the Caribbean sea starts to seem like “sheets of zinc” and the sun like “steady acetylene”.
The dominance of tourist-oriented, rather than local-oriented, businesses is also suggested in Walcott’s poem “The Star Apple Kingdom”, which describes the “ulcers” of “hotels”, “casinos”, “brothels”, and the “empires of tobacco, sugar and bananas”.
In his Nobel prize lecture, Walcott condemns tourist brochures for reducing the enormous diversity of the Caribbean environment to blandly appealing beach vistas out of “the shame of necessity”, mourning the islands’ “future of polluted marinas”.
My research into environmental racism and the damaging myth of Caribbean paradise has also been inspired by the work of the Bahamian-born poet Marion Bethel. She writes about how colonial violence led to the brutal demise of the Caribbean environment through forest clearance, soil erosion and reef destruction.
In her poem “On a Coral Cay”, Bethel protests how in the Bahamas “the whale done dead … we no longer whale or wreck”. She also considers how the effects of the colonial past have catalyzed new forms of environmental degradation in the present day. “Tourism”, she writes, “is king / divine and banking, a silver prince”, and this “tourist plantation” and “banking estate” has made the natives “waiters” who “service the world”.
Be an Ethical Tourist
Listening to Caribbean voices should prompt us to practice more ethical travel as tourists. Visiting the Caribbean for a holiday is not in itself immoral, but Bethel, Walcott and other Caribbean writers have condemned unethical tourism practices.
Despite the economic importance of tourism in the Caribbean, the local environment and particularly marine life continues to suffer as a consequence of unsustainable activities catering to demanding tourists.
Income from tourists is rarely distributed evenly: so support native businesses by shopping locally instead of at popular, often foreign-owned chains. Be respectful of native customs and traditions. Do more than dwell in the luxury of your hotel or on the beach: immerse yourself in Caribbean culture by visiting museums and historical sites. Opt for eco-friendly transportation. Don’t litter. Take photos of the land and the animals with caution and respect, and make sure the local people give their permission before they end up on your Instagram feed. -This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
New iPhone 13 smartphones are introduced during a virtual event held to announce new Apple products. >AP/Jae C. Hong >AP/Jae C. Hong
Apple’s Next iPhone Mirrors Last Year’s, Adds More Storage
The Associated Press
SAN RAMON, Calif. (AP) — Apple has unveiled its next iPhone line-up, including a model that offers twice the storage available in earlier versions and other modest upgrades to last year’s editions that proved to be a big hit among consumers devouring the latest technology during the pandemic. A recent pre-recorded video event Apple a chance to present a polished story following a turbulent few weeks. The recent bumps included a hastily patched security vulnerability that could let hackers secretly take control of iPhones and other
Apple devices; a backlash to the company’s plans to scan iPhones for images of child sex abuse and a federal judge’s ruling that chipped away further at the competitive barrier Apple built around its app store, which generates billions of dollars in profits each year. As has been the case since Apple’s late cofounder unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, Apple executives talked reverently about the latest model, even though it isn’t dramatically different from the version Apple released nearly a year ago. Like last year’s model, the new iPhone 13 will come in four different designs, with prices starting from $700 to $1,100. They’re scheduled to be in stores September 24. “It’s an incremental upgrade,” said Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen. “Some of the new features are impressive, but most of them are not noticeable or practical for most users.” Possibly the most notable change in the latest high-end iPhone 13 will be an option for a full terabyte of storage — that’s 1,000 gigabytes — on the device, up from its previous maximum of 512 gigabytes. That’s enough storage to accommodate roughly 250,000 photos, or about 500 hours of high definition video. Having a massive amount of storage could become more important to many consumers with the advent of ultra-high definition video and ultrafast wireless 5G networks that will make downloading content faster and easier, Nguyen said. Apple is also promising better cameras on the iPhone 13, including an improved ultrawide lens, a cinematic-like video feature and technology for better nighttime pictures. (The latter mirrors a feature Google has long offered in its line of Pixel phones, which haven’t been big sellers yet.) As usual, the latest iPhones are supposed to have longer-lasting batteries, too. “We keep making the iPhone more capable,” Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted. These kinds of incremental upgrades have become routine for Apple and other device makers in recent years as the pace of smartphone innovation slowed, even while prices for some phones have climbed above $1,000. That trend has prompted more consumers to hold on to their older smartphones for longer periods. But the release of last year’s iPhone 12 unleashed one of Apple’s biggest sales spurts since 2014, possibly because the pandemic helped make homebound people realize it was time to get a newer and better model than what they had been using. Through the first six months of this year, Apple’s iPhone sales have surged by nearly 60 percent from the same time last year. That boom has helped push Apple’s stock price near its all-time highs recently, giving the company a market value of about $2.5 trillion -- more than twice what it was before the pandemic began 18 months ago. Apple’s shares dipped by about 1 percent last week when the new iPhones were unveiled, a sign that investors weren’t excited by what they saw in the new model. Although the iPhone is still by far Apple’s biggest moneymaker, the company has been trying to supplement its success with peripheral products such as its smartwatch. The Cupertino, California, company used Tuesday’s showcase to provide a preview of its next Apple Watch, which will feature a thinner, more rounded and brighter display.
Fashion Designers of Latin America Get a Standup Ovation
THE WEEKLY JOURNAL Staff
With a standup ovation, the Fashion Designers of Latin America (FDLA) successfully closed the return to physical shows during the recent New York Fashion Week (NYFW). The fashion festivities kicked off with a private designer’s welcome dinner reception, followed by an up-close in-person showcase featuring the best of Latin-American Fashion Designers.
The physical shows also included a continuation of the FDLA digital platform with fashion films presented by Custo Barcelona, Glenkora Comte, Leti Faviani and collective fashion film presented by Conglomerado Textil Boliviano featuring brands and fashion designers; Awaj Warmi, Fotrama, Carmen Claure and Talentos.
“We are extremely grateful to all designers, guests, and media who participated in our LIVE catwalks, showing a strong come back of this fashion season and celebrating the best of Latin American fashion in both physical and digital presentations,” said Albania Rosario, founder of the FDLA and Executive Board member at Latinas in Business Inc. “We also thank our main sponsors, Hennessy V.S.O.P, Delta Air Lines and Hispanic Federation for their presence and continuous support to our efforts to bring the best designers of Latin America to the U.S. markets,” she added.
The FDLA live shows presented the spring/ summer collections of emergent designers such as;
Agatha Ruiz de la Prada - Spain, Dante Luxury Footwear- Mexico, Dayana Leon - Venezuela, Giannina Azar - the Dominican Republic, Indira & Isidro - Mexico, Idol Jose - Venezuela, Jose Ventura - Dominican Republic, Paris Rodriguez – Colombia, Rosita Hurtado - Bolivia, Samantha Telfair - Puerto Rico, Yas Gonzalez - Cuba and Yirko Sivirich - Peru.
Fashion Designers of Latin America required all participating staff, designers, models and all guests to be fully vaccinated. The fashion shows were also produced in adherence to New York State Health Guidelines.
