Home
American Documentary, Inc.
> Home > Program Guide > Check Local Listings
Program Guide - True Lives
Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song by Pedro Rivera and Susan Zeig
About the Filmmaker:

Susan Zeig and Pedro Rivera co-directed Manos a la Obra: The Story of Operation Bootstrap, which was funded by the NEH, the NEA, and New York State Councils for the Arts and Humanities. Together they directed the Young Filmmakers Super-8 Workshop on New York's Lower East Side. Zeig is an Associate Professor of Film at Long Island University and co-directs a project for the University Satellite Network. Rivera holds a Masters Degree in American Studies and has been awarded an Artist-in-Residence at El Museo del Barrio in New York City.

Buy the Film:

To buy a copy of this film please contact:

The Cinema Guild
130 Madison Avenue
2nd Floor
New York, NY 10016-7038

Phone:
(212) 685-6242

Fax:
(212) 685-4717

Email | Website

Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song by Pedro Rivera and Susan Zeig

Watch the Trailer (popup video window) Check Local Listings (popup window)

Download Press Materials:
Press Release: PDF | DOC
Jump to photosVIEW AND DOWNLOAD
PHOTOS
It is difficult to sit still when the rattlesnake makes a "scratch, scratch, scratch." Sound from a guiro syncopates against the rhyming lyrics of a Puerto Rican plena. Pedro Rivera and Susan Zeig's film, Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song, travels from the sugar plantations of Puerto Rico to the docks of San Juan to the streets of New York's barrio, in search of this unique musical form.

Everywhere the camera roams it finds plena singers, pleneros, combining a rhythmic mix of politics, comments on daily life and love, to create a spicy Caribbean stew of protest, satire, and joy.

The plena's roots go back to the early 1900s when the majority of Puerto Ricans were peasants, artisans, or farmers. By the late 1920s RCA had created its first plena recording star, Canario. One woman, who recalls working for only 50-cents a day, says, "In those days the poor person's only source of enjoyment and news was the plena."

New pleneros, like Mon Rivera and Rafael Cortijo, donned suits and bowties in an effort to move their songs off the streets and into venues like New York's Palladium and the Tropicana, or into American living rooms through television during the 1950s. Their plenas still enlivened every imaginable topic: unrequited love, mechanization, funerals, unsafe factory conditions, and many more.

During the 1960s the form's commercial viability declined, but the film captures its continuing influence as a large, plena-throbbing throng of people attend the 1985 funeral of popular singer Ismael Rivera. A young man takes the filmmakers on a tour of his shanty town in the shadow of San Juan's skyscrapers. He tells how his father taught him the meaning of plenas, how the pleneros helped build the city, leaving lingering rhythms in the slabs of concrete and in the hearts of the people.

(1991, 29 min.)

Plena Is Work, Plena Is Song will be shown with the short film, Marc and Ann.

Top of Page TOP OF PAGE | 2006 PROGRAM GUIDE LISTING | 2005 PROGRAM GUIDE LISTING

View and Download Photos:

Note: Click on an image to open the full size version in a new window. Use File > Save As... to save the image to your hard drive. Photos are for press and private use only. All rights reserved. All uses of the photos must be credited as indicated below. For additional information on rights and clearance isssues, contact communications@pov.org.

Photo thumbnail

Caption:
Musicians in the Bronx get together to socialize and sing the "plena," the blues music of Puerto Rico
Credit:
Carlos DeJesus

Top of Page TOP OF PAGE | 2006 PROGRAM GUIDE LISTING | 2005 PROGRAM GUIDE LISTING

True Lives is presented by American Documentary, Inc. and National Educational Telecommunications Association.

National Educational Telecommunications Association

Download the 2006 True Lives Press Release: PDF | DOC
Copyright ©2006 American Documentary, Inc. | About American Documentary, Inc. | POV