“There is a saying, ’God willing,’ but on the island you say ‘Island willing,’ as if the island was an entity...We treat the island as a person.”

With 61 times more endemic species than the Galápagos per square kilometer and a capricious climate, Chile’s Robinson Crusoe Island dictates every aspect of life. Once where the real-life Robinson Crusoe washed ashore, the Island was never home to an Indigenous population. Instead, the first humans arrived from all over the world just over 200 years ago and came to identify as “endemic” themselves while stewarding this biodiverse ecosystem.

After moving in with four generations of the Goldsworthy family–one of the first families to come to Robinson Crusoe Island–filmmaker Cece King felt how the Island is not a backdrop—but a force, a character.

But the culture of stewardship and coexistence with nature is under siege. When Chile designated the Island a National Park, conservation policies violently banned farming and displaced islanders from their land, while inadvertently introducing invasive species. Now islanders face over-dependence on mainland goods and an economic need to export local seafood.

In the face of these pressures, islanders demonstrate that climate resilience doesn’t come from controlling a landscape, but from a deeply rooted sense of place.

Through shifting tones—stormy and poetic, playful and tense—the island emerges as both muse and mirror. Grounded in the well-researched knowledge that hope–not doomsday narratives–inspire environmental action, "Si La Isla Quiere" ("Island Willing") offers a radically intimate lens on climate and culture, told through lyrical vignettes and a dynamic, intergenerational ensemble cast whose lives are inseparable from the Island’s wellbeing. From 60 meters underwater to 3,000 feet above sea level, the film invites audiences into the lives of islanders who tell the story of the Island and invites audiences to reconsider what it truly means to live with nature.