Puerto Rico enters its fifth year of recession as the government tries to close a $3.2 billion budget gap, and Fault Lines follows the fallout on the ground. Governor Luis Fortuno, a fiscal conservative, has already laid off 20,000 government workers and suspended labor negotiations; his answer to the university system's shortfall is a tuition hike that sends students into the streets and, in some cases, into police custody. The film interviews arrested students alongside Fortuno himself, and checks in with labor unions trying to organize a workforce with unemployment near 17 percent. The reporting widens from campus protests to the island's colonial relationship with Washington, asking what economic and social obligation the United States owes a commonwealth it has governed for over a century. Puerto Rico's economy is projected to grow slower than almost any other in the world if conditions do not change, and the film uses that number to frame austerity not as an abstract policy debate but as a lived, contested experiment.