The Puerto Rican film *Fight Back*, which will hit the big screen in November and stars Ana Isabelle and Jason Calderón, highlights female empowerment through resilience, love, and martial arts, with a special appearance by Spanish karateka Sandra Sánchez.
“One of the main messages of ‘Fight Back’ is to empower women to pursue their dreams, to be independent, to believe in themselves, and to fight against emotional and physical abuse,” Ana Isabelle told EFE. She makes her debut as a producer on this film alongside Lizaida Rivera.
The feature film, shot in Miami and Puerto Rico, is directed by Bruno Irizarry and highlights female strength in an archipelago that has one of the highest per-capita rates of femicides in Latin America, with 54 direct femicides in 2025 and 28 in the first half of this year, according to the latest report from the Gender Equality Observatory.
“It’s not about encouraging violence—quite the opposite; it’s about fostering respect, autonomy, and self-control, but also that sense of leadership that tells us we don’t have to settle for less, that we don’t have to accept being treated poorly for whatever reason, and that men are no better than us,” explains Ana Isabelle.
In the film, the Puerto Rican singer and actress plays Patricia, a retired Olympic athlete and mother of a girl with an incurable illness who decides to return to karate.
The winner of the first season of the show “¡Viva el sueño!”, an American format created by Univision in 2009, and the actress who played Rosalía in Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story,’ admits that she fulfilled a dream by working with Sánchez, considered the greatest karateka of all time.
‘Fight Back,’ the movie: From Olympic gold to the big screen
Ana Isabelle contacted the Olympic champion to offer her the role of “the villain” in *Fight Back*, and Sánchez, at first, thought it was a joke because this year she’s also making her film debut in *Karateka*, a movie produced by Netflix Spain and A3 Media that’s inspired by her life and career.
“Suddenly finding myself involved in two projects—it seems incredible, and you wonder how all this is happening to you—but at the same time, you feel hopeful that, I don’t know, if dreams come true this way, well, let’s make them come true, right?” Sánchez told EFE. She participated this month in a martial arts seminar in Puerto Rico alongside her husband and coach, Jesús del Moral.
Sánchez admits that she is “very aware” of the sexism that exists in the world and of how “martial arts can, in some way, help women,” after revealing that the film about her life shows she suffered “an assault” and that, thanks to karate, she was able to get out of that situation “without anything more serious happening.”
“So, I’m very aware of how karate has helped me avoid freezing up, from going into shock,” says Sánchez, a native of Talavera de la Reina, who hopes that her appearance on ‘Fight Back’ will inspire more women “to practice martial arts, to find motivation, and to gain confidence.”
First Puerto Rican film with an original soundtrack in 20 years
In addition to acting and getting her start in film production, Ana Isabelle composed the soundtrack for *Fight Back*, and one of the songs is “Pa’Lante Voy,” featuring Álex Zurdo.
“It’s been more than 20 years since a movie with a ‘soundtrack’ was made in Puerto Rico, so this has also been a way to bring all my passions together in one big project,” admits the multifaceted artist.
Puerto Rican films are gaining an increasingly prominent presence at international film festivals, and an agent is already hard at work to secure a spot for “Fight Back” at film festivals as well.
Ana Isabelle revealed that they plan to create sequels to this feature film and secure funding to shoot in Japan or turn Puerto Rico into a “karate hub,” drawing on the more than 20 martial arts academies that collaborated on the project, according to Agencia EFE.