Welcome Home (“The Distorted Island”): Exclusive Premiere of Feature-Length Doc On Heavy Metal Community in Puerto Rico!

The bustling, thriving heavy metal scene in Puerto Rico may have thus far escaped the attention of metaldom writ large, but that is no doubt about to change courtesy The Distorted Island, a fascinating, edifying, perception-altering, due-giving feature-length documentary that takes viewers on an inspiring tour of a extremely extreme, beautiful microcosm of pure creation and trve fandom.

And we’re premiering the entire goddamn thing right here, right now:

Executive producer Nelson Varas-Díaz shared a few thoughts with Decibel about the origin and execution of the film:

I participated in an academic conference in 2010 organized by Dr. Niall Scott on heavy metal and politics. I was very impressed by the extent to which scholars had engaged in research on the genre throughout the world. Still, I recognized that the Caribbean region was completely unexplored even though metal has been present there for a long time. In an effort to better document how heavy metal is produced in the Caribbean, I began with Puerto Rico as a case study. We are now recording and gathering data in Cuba and the Dominican Republic as part of our study…

The response to the documentary and the study that informs it has been excellent. Metal fans know this effort is being carried out by a team that are fans of the music and understand where they are coming from. It is done with a lot of respect for metal and for what it has meant for all of us. The film has received two awards, which were a complete surprise for us. The documentary has had official showings in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Canada, Finland and the United States. The physical copies of the documentary have been distributed free of charge through every continent. We feel privileged to have been able to do this, and are working on a follow-up documentary focusing on the rest of the Caribbean…

As we continue to explore metal throughout the world we highlight the great diversity entailed in making music in all of these settings. Culture, politics and geography all play a great role in shaping our metal related experiences. We are simply trying to shed light on how this happens in a region of the world where heavy metal has been long active, but unfortunately unknown to many.

BONUS: Preview of the upcoming “Metal Islands” conference…