Juan C. Dávila focuses on environmentalism, social movements and globalization. He usually concentrates his work on the islands of Puerto Rico, understanding how United States colonialism and neoliberal policies impact the archipelago. At the beginning of his career he was more inclined into making fiction films, but found in non-fiction filmmaking the adequate space for the type of social and political work he wanted to do.
After covering the 2010 Student Strike in Puerto Rico for TeleSur, he founded a non-profit organization called Frutos Fílmicos. The organization was instituted with the purpose of producing films that can investigate social and environmental issues, but also to tell stories that mainstream media often ignores. With Frutos Fílmicos, Dávila made his first feature length documentary, Compañeros de lucha (2012). The film screened internationally at various film festivals and received a worldwide distribution deal from Cinema Libre Studio.
In 2013, he enrolled at the University of California, Santa Cruz to pursue a Master of Arts in Social Documentation. Dávila graduated in June 2015, and as part of his thesis he made La generación del estanbai (2016), a short documentary film that explores under-employment through Guy Standing’s idea of the “precariat”. While making graduate studies, he also finished his second documentary feature, Vieques: una batalla inconclusa (2016). His last two films are distributed by Third World Newsreel.
Soon after receiving his Master’s Degree, Dávila was awarded a Video News Production Fellowship at Democracy Now! in New York, where he spent a year working in their daily news hour. Among his most significant works at Democracy Now! were his coverage of the Climate Change Conference in Paris, the Black Lives Matter Movement in New York and the Anti-Austerity Movements in Puerto Rico. He continues to work as a correspondent for the independent media organization and is now pursuing a Philosophy Doctorate in Latin American and Latinx Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
