Festival de cine INSTAR

Notas

IV INSTAR Film Festival awards the documentaries ‘Mafifa’ and ‘Option Zero’.

The Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR) denounced, in a press release, the discredit to which this edition of the Festival was subjected.

CiberCuba Staff - 12/12/2023 - 6:06pm (GMT-5)

CIBERCUBA

Poster of ‘Mafifa’ Picture © Prensa Latina

The independent documentary 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso, was awarded along with 'Option Zero' (2020), by Marcel Beltrán, at the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, which took place last week in seven cities on two continents, and virtually in Cuba.

'Mafifa', which takes a surprising and interesting trip to Santiago de Cuba through its most autochthonous and popular culture, was awarded the Nicolás Guillén Landrián prize, corresponding to 3,000 dollars. Meanwhile, the documentary 'Option Zero', which narrates the passage of a group of Cuban migrants through the Darien jungle, received a special mention, consisting of 1,500 dollars.

The members of the jury, composed of Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Brazilian critic and historian, and one of the authorities on Latin American cinema; Dunja Fehimović, academic specialized in Caribbean cinema and university professor in the United Kingdom, and Cuban screenwriter Alejandro Hernández, winner of the Goya Award in 2013, recognized both feature films for reflecting a taboo subject in a conception where "the conceptual and artistic quality of the works in relation to their thematic proposals" stands out.

Captura de Facebook/Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt

The awards and closing ceremony held online praised "the quality and diversity of the selected films", in a space that opens "the opportunity to approach different cinematographies of the global south, which do not always have the presence they deserve in the traditional circuits of exhibition and audiovisual distribution".

They also had words of celebration for the filmmakers who managed to "overcome their adverse production circumstances and deliver films that profoundly question their respective socio-political contexts”.

This edition of the Festival sought to explore "the transnational character of Cuban independent cinema, as well as its growing dialogue with other cinematographies, especially those from areas also ruled by authoritarian governments," said the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), founded and directed by visual artist and activist Tania Bruguera.

The call caused discomfort in the state spheres of Cuban culture. The National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) described it, in a statement, as "a new attack on Cuban culture". According to the pro-government entity, the participants intended to "rewrite history and falsify the realities of the nation”.

Also, the "non-first lady" of Cuba, Lis Cuesta, said on X that "Homeland is the Culture of its People, then, it is very predictable that the enemies attack it, more of the same, they are so uncreative, the miserable ones. We will defend the revolutionary Culture as our independence", in clear reference to the Festival.

For its part, a statement by Bruguera, published on INSTAR's Facebook profile, denounced the maneuvers of the regime to make this event unsuccessful.”

"The discrediting attempts, the harassment and persecution towards our festival, and the artists and collaborators who participated in it, on the part of Cuban public officials, as well as entities influenced by the Cuban party-state, demonstrate once again the totalitarian nature of the regime that reigns on the island," she said in the statement.

Captura de Facebook/Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt

At the same time, she criticized "the public use of the term cultural terrorism by State officials is not casual, it is part of a coordinated coup, that they believe is definitive, on artists who question their reality. Bureaucrats miscalculate".

In an issue that linked the support and solidarity of Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), PEN International, and 29 civil society organizations and PEN centers, which "remind us that we are not alone in this struggle for freedom of thought and artistic expression in Cuba."

"Together, we can always resist censorship and create a space for art and freedom of thought to flourish," he concluded.

You can read the original note here

IV Festival de Cine INSTAR premia los documentales Read More »

Mafifa

By Pablo Gamba – december 12th, 2023

LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE

The winning film of the INSTAR Festival, 'Mafifa', premiered in 2021 at IDFA in Amsterdam, screened at the Havana Film Festival in 2022, and won Best Documentary Feature at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. Daniela Muñoz Barroso attempts to create a portrait of the title character, a woman with a mysterious life who came to play the " macho bell" in the conga of Santiago de Cuba. The singularity is the subjectivity of Gladys Linares Acuña's search, following the trail of her record in the official memory and the memories of those who knew her in a sensory cinema marked by a limitation of the senses. It thus reflects the progressive hearing loss of the filmmaker, who could no longer hear Mafifa's instrument.
 
From the beginning as a road movie on the bus trip to Santiago, the documentary immerses the viewers in its sensory experience. It does so not only with the soundtrack but also with a camera that expresses the subjectivity of the filmmaker's character. This is achieved through detail shots, camera movements, and, in particular, the privileged attention paid to the characters' mouths. It mirrors the experience of the woman who reads the lips of those who speak with her. It also reflects the experience of a woman who perceives her presence in a place by sight and touch, in contact with everything that surrounds her, but, at the same time, at a distance because she does not hear certain sounds.
 
This, however, has the limitation of a film that does not present itself as an experimental documentary. From the beginning, there is also a counterpoint between the subjective sound and the extradiegetic narrating voice, in which the filmmaker's character is shown as she is by how we, who do not have hearing loss, hear her. Her way of speaking is borderline unintelligible at the beginning to draw attention to this but becomes more diaphanous throughout the film. It is worth noting the courage of Muñoz Barroso to show in on, off, and over her voice as it is, making it clear that understanding what she says only requires a little more attention. 
 
In the auditory and visual planes, there is also a back and forth of this internal ocularization and auricularization, following the terminology of Gaudreault and Jost, to zero degrees in both cases. The opposite of the subjective is in the extradiegetic voice and, visually, in the aerial planes of the conga moving through the streets, in which the perspective is that of a "mega-narrator “, according to these same authors. 
 
The film also stands out for the parallelism between the progressive loss of hearing, which leads the filmmaker-narrator to appeal to her memory of the sounds she can no longer hear, and the story of the investigation to assemble the portrait of Mafifa, with a tour of the place where she lived, documents, and testimonies. It is evident that the characters never knew, told, or could tell the whole truth about her as if society had become a little blind and mute about the way of being and living of a woman who defied sexism in music and her personal life. 
 
In this sense, the search for Mafifa is also Daniela Muñoz Barroso's search for herself, another woman at odds with her environment, not only because of her hearing condition but also as an independent filmmaker in Cuba. Just as the film makes the proximity-distance of hearing loss strongly felt at the beginning, it returns to the same at the end, with the story of the ascent to a mountain, where the filmmaker's character finds a place where she can feel in harmony with silence. Thus, the documentary emphasizes the limitation of the documentarian’s encounters with the characters, whom she always perceives as from a world apart. It is a problematization that is almost essential in today's ethnographic cinema.
 
This reflexive aspect of 'Mafifa' extends to its construction of the others, who are always characters in a film of this type. Afro-Cuban culture and its tensions with what Paul Schroeder identifies as the hegemonic "socialist modernity" in Cuba, a project of European origin that does not cease to reproduce the colonial relationship, although its aspirations are different. Nor has socialism been successful in overcoming traditional inequalities, such as those of women in relation to men, or sexism. These are problems that the critical filmmakers of ICAIC's official cinema harshly encountered, as evidenced by masterpieces such as 'One Way or Another' (1974), by Sara Gómez.
 
It should be noted, therefore, that the ascent to the peace of the mountain does not constitute an escapist response or anything of the sort in 'Mafifa'. On the contrary, from this awareness of her difference with the characters and the filmmaker's dissonance with her world, the film plunges into the neo-baroque question, also pointed out by Schroeder, of the tensions between socialist modernity and an Afro-Cuban culture that has been modernized by the revolution, but also by its capacity to survive in tension with it or in resistance, as Bolívar Echeverría would say. Gender also comes into play, the rebelliousness of women from diverse cultures and social conditions against male hegemony, and even the problematic notion of "disability", in the way Muñoz Barroso challenges the stereotype.
 
This opens another door to the identification of the filmmaker and the viewers with the characters, no longer as "people" in the official way this is understood. Muñoz Barroso perceives, in the dance and the drum and bell tolls, an encounter of Afro-Cuban bodies with themselves in socialist Cuba. It is a way of saying that Gladys Linares was the woman she wanted to be and that her countrymen called her Mafifa when she danced and played the bell very loudly. It entails the recognition in the dancers of an African identity that resists a colonizing modernity in these movements, just as Mafifa resisted sexism. There is a part of the film where rain and fire come into play in relation to this, which opens the viewers' imagination to another way for these people to be in the world and to relate to its elements. 
 
But the question remains whether Daniela Muñoz Barroso, the filmmaker, and we, the audience, are condemned to remain at the other pole of this tension, that of socialist modernity or "liberal modernity", also identified by Schroeder and which is colonialist by definition, as opposed to the modern people who resist. The question arises from the "progress" to which ethnographic documentary and art cinema are linked as a spectacle for the enjoyment of an enlightened elite. 
 
The answer could be that no, we can somehow place ourselves on the other side of these tensions. In Mafifa's subjective attempt to immerse us in the human stream of the conga, we perceive the violence with which the police act to keep it within the limits of "order," as if fearing that resistance might spill over into revolt or rebellion. We vicariously feel a terrible echo of the whip and club treatment given to the slaves, as if we too were being controlled by the agents' violence. And this is not merely imaginary. It would really be in the face of such a common enemy that we could all find ourselves, despite our differences, in a people without quotation marks.

You can read the original note here

Mafifa nota los experimentos Read More »

Mafifa' and 'The Zero Option', winners at the IV INSTAR Film Festival

Two Cuban independent films win awards for reflecting a controversial topic in their society, according to the jury.

Madrid 12 Dec 2023 – 00:20 CET

ddc

Still from 'Mafifa', by Daniela Muñoz Barroso. RIALTA

El filme independiente cubano Mafifa (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso, received the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award from the jury of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, while 'Option Zero' (2020), by Marcel Beltrán, received a special mention.

Both feature films were recognized for reflecting a controversial topic, among the 15 audiovisual works by Cuban creators presented during the past week in seven major cities on two continents, and online in Cuba. The main award is endowed with 3,000 dollars and the special mention with 1,500.

The members of the jury, consisting of Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Brazilian critic and historian and one of the authorities on Latin American cinema; Dunja Fehimović, an academic specializing in Caribbean cinema and university professor in the United Kingdom, and Cuban screenwriter Alejandro Hernández, winner of the Goya Award in 2013; to reach their verdict, they considered "the conceptual and artistic quality of the works in relation to their thematic proposals".

In an online meeting, the jurors celebrated the festival for "the quality and diversity of the selected films", apart from offering "the opportunity to approach different cinematographies of the global south, which do not always have the presence they deserve in the traditional circuits of audiovisual exhibition and distribution”.

They also recognized "the resilience, courage, and inventiveness of the filmmakers to overcome their adverse production circumstances and deliver films that profoundly question their respective socio-political contexts".

"It seems to me of utmost importance the work of the INSTAR Festival in disseminating and promoting the cinema of young Cuban creators, especially in light of the disappearance of the Young Filmmaker Showcase, which was, for many years, a fundamental critical space for so many, including several of the filmmakers whose works have competed for this award," Fehimović emphasized.

The professor pointed out that the event reflects "the evolution, or the current state of Cuban cinema, or its younger practitioners. I am referring to the transnational approach of the programming and screenings, which highlights an expansive vision of Cuban cinema, connected to the rest of the world and socio-political dynamics and international creative tendencies".

Cuban artivist Tania Bruguera, director of the Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), said that the Festival has received proposals from three other cities around the world to organize its screenings in 2024 when its fifth edition should be held.

"We want it to be a party and a meeting place and a place for serious and important discussions for filmmakers," she said.

The Festival, curated by Cuban filmmaker José Luis Aparicio, was held in movie theaters and cultural centers in Barcelona, Paris, Miami, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo, and was curated by Cuban filmmaker José Luis Aparicio. It could also be accessed online from Cuba through Festhome.

The concept guiding the edition was the transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema, as well as its growing dialogue with diverse cinematographies, especially those of countries ruled by authoritarian governments. 

In addition to short and feature films by Cuban filmmakers, this edition included works by filmmakers from Haiti, Iran, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Their directors live in exile due to the repressive situation in their countries of origin.

The Cuban regime launched a smear campaign against the exhibition through the official press and the social media of Ministry of Culture officials and the ideological apparatus, while the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema of Havana excluded from its program at the last minute, Luis Alejandro Yero's 'Calls from Moscow', screened at the INSTAR Film Festival.

You can read the original note here

Mafifa y La opcion cero galardonadas Read More »

Hojas de K', an urgent film. Interview with Nicaraguan filmmaker Gloria Carrión

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS - december 11th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Hojas de K' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGEN hojasdek.com)

'Leaves of K.' (2022), by Nicaraguan Gloria Carrión, braids into a single voice the testimonies of several Nicaraguan women repressed by Daniel Ortega's regime during the massive protests of April 2018. In the first days of December, the Central American filmmaker added this collective truth to the cries of creative freedom gathered in the official selection of the IV INSTAR Film Festival -which culminated the day before with the awarding of the documentary Mafifa (2021), by Cuban Daniela Muñoz Barroso.

The absolute silence in which totalitarian states dream of submerging the divergent positions and representations of their monochord version of reality will always be challenged -and, in the long run, defeated- by those discourses that escape in the wind, like light leaves.

Through Messenger and WhatsApp came the answers of Gloria Carrión to my questions about the process, motives, and consequences of the clandestine pages written by the plural protagonist of 'Leaves of K.'; those that have managed to slip through the repressive walls to reveal other versions of reality: the underlying faces behind the frozen smile that the regime presents to the world.

K. is a collective body represented as a young student. Are all the testimonies compiled from teenagers and young adults? Or did you also include those from other generations?

Most of the testimonies were given by young women. They ranged from teenagers to young women up to 22 or 23 years old. I interviewed a total of ten. Only two of them were older. One was about 40 years old, and the other was 30. They all were involved, in different areas of the country, in the civic protests of April 2018.

I met with each of them, either in person or virtually. We were in the same country, but some lived in other areas. Others could not leave their homes because they were under police siege. I found them through the grassroots feminist and human rights organizations I was cooperating with. It was through them that I made the contacts.

The truth is that I was living in Nicaragua at that time; we were all living in Nicaragua. And I communicated with all of them. However, when I finished the last interview, I realized that my think tank, where I was working, was being persecuted. I could no longer continue conducting interviews.

In fact, I was going to film a documentary series on the April civic uprising before I left Nicaragua. I couldn't do that anymore. And I took the testimonies with me in my suitcase. I had three days to leave the country because of the repression, and when I left and managed to unpack, I remembered that I had these audios. And animation became the only possible way I could find to tell this story.

Most of the creative team of K. Sheets uses pseudonyms. What are the dangers of revealing their names?

Most of the creative team uses pseudonyms, and they risk being victims of state persecution themselves, [and also] their families, and even forced exile. In Nicaragua, the situation is so terrible because of the repression and the state violence that having participated in a short film like this can have very big consequences, even jail. Because now, no one is exempt from ending up in prison for saying or doing things that contradict the government's version of what happened in 2018.

Poster of 'Hojas de K.' (2022). (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

If any team members still live in Nicaragua, can it be said that 'Leaves of K.' is a "co-production" between physical Nicaragua and diasporic Nicaragua?

It can definitely be said that 'Leaves of K.' is a co-production between physical Nicaragua and diasporic Nicaragua; no doubt about it. In fact, I began to conceive it and finished it while I was already in exile, collaborating with people inside the country. That is certainly true, and I think it's also a testimony to the resilience of Nicaraguan filmmakers who, like Cuban creators, try to make films and tell stories despite adversity and political persecution.

Do you identify any creative influences from film or other arts in ‘Leaves of K.’?

Well, literature definitely has a huge influence on my work. I love poetry, I love it, but I also love narrative. I read a lot. In fact, I got into cinema through literature, and I don't think I've ever left it behind. It has always been like a ground of great inspiration, a personal creative world; it is part of my creative constellation, of my creative universe.

The title and the visual structure of the film resemble a diary. They are like sheets of paper written in secret, passed around, and exchanged through the bars of the cells. The idea was to give this feeling of a personal diary, a diary of personal memory. Undoubtedly, I find a lot of inspiration in literature. I also find a lot of inspiration in painting. I like the impressionist school very much, and there is some of that also in the way stains and colors invade the screen. I dialogue a lot with painting. My works have a kind of plastic element, I think, that I always like to explore. I love to delve into these frontiers between the arts and to be a bit disobedient. Never very purist in anything.

Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)
Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)
Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)
Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

'Leaves of K.' is an animated film. What advantages and/or obstacles have you faced when participating in festivals and distributing it?

I think the fact that 'Leaves of K.' is a documentary animation sometimes makes it difficult to present, especially at festivals or more traditional spaces for documentary exhibitions where documentaries are still considered as something with a linear or traditional structure. So, it has been hard to move it in those spaces.

People have questioned the fact that I consider it a documentary and I think that has a lot to do with a conversation that's happening more but that is definitely worth continuing: all genres are becoming contaminated.

Because the truth is that everything is staged. I don't believe much (I distrust a lot) in documentary representation as an image that can reveal the truth. For me, the truth does not exist as a monolithic matter. To me, it seems to be more complex than that, and also believe it is in this contamination, so to speak, between genres and between the different ways of telling stories because it is very similar to life, to something that flows, something alive, there is not just one way to tell it. I think it has a lot to do with what I was telling you about the disobedience of the form that attracts me so much. And, above all, it seems to me that it has the seed of freedom in itself.

I am very much looking for that: being able to write, to tell stories, and to narrate in freedom, from freedom, and for freedom. And even more so in a context of persecution and political adversity. This seems very important to me. At least, it gives me a lot of strength and desire to continue telling things, resisting through stories, cinema, and art. I think it is fundamental to stay alive.

Has 'Leaves of K.' been screened in Nicaragua. Has it been distributed in any way in your country?

It has not been screened in Nicaragua. There has been no way to distribute it because of the tight control, but also because, to a certain extent, I feel responsible for the team that worked with me. And the truth is that I don't want to expose them to any repercussions or anything like that, so we have not taken the steps to distribute it in Nicaragua yet.

But I hope that, at some point, we will be able to do it because I would love for this film to be seen in Nicaragua. It is a fundamental film for the country and also for the region, especially in the context of the rise of authoritarian governments that are sadly gaining ground. I think it is a very urgent film.

You can read the original note here

Hojas de K una pelicula urgente Read More »

Four directors talk about the IV INSTAR Film Festival

By EDGAR ARIEL – December 10th, 2023

RIALTA

During the filming of ‘Roads of lava' (2023), by Gretel Marín, a film included in the IV INSTAR Film Festival competition (IMAGE YouTube / Rialta Ediciones - IV Festival de Cine INSTAR: La Guía [episode 4]).

The fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival ends this Sunday. Its vigorous presence -on this occasion as a competition- confirms the need for a sustained reflection on the production, distribution, and configuration of films made in peripheral areas, often with vindicatory agendas and through dissident mechanisms. In this regard, Rialta News has interviewed several of the participants in this film event. They are Cuban filmmaker, screenwriter, and journalist Carlos Melián, Nicaraguan filmmaker Gloria Carrión, Cuban filmmaker Ricardo Figueredo, and Venezuelan colleague Jhon Ciavaldini.

We do so under the following presuppositions and questions... These days, the IV INSTAR Film Festival has been developed with a transnational perspective. Its organizers insist on committing to "daring" cinematographies that "explore the limits of the unusual, of the experimental: the limits of creation". So, how do you value the appearance of this festival and its support to independent filmmakers in subaltern environments; as an observer and/or part of the phenomenon, how do you value the current paths of Cuban cinema and its diasporic character?

Carlos Melián

I would like the festival to grow, to become a meeting point and a platform for debate within the Cuban diaspora. But I also feel that it could be quite boring. The diaspora should step out of itself, out of its circular journeys, perhaps through the idea of exile.

For instance, in this exhibition, I saw a Haitian film that made me realize that we can't always access films from Haiti. In that sense, INSTAR was much more important because it put me in contact with Haiti. Haiti is a lot like Santiago de Cuba. Like Cuba. They were talking about us there. We are united by ruin. So, the idea that a festival for the Cuban diaspora could be fun or useful fell apart for me.

Perhaps it would be good to make it a festival for the Caribbean. I mean, Cuban cinema as a diaspora, as an exile, does not interest me. It's frustrating that we can only aspire to be framed as a diaspora. We should run away from that label that only brings anti-capitalist and Cuban sympathizers to theaters. That niche audience doesn't interest me, it saddens me. We have to burn all that.

The current paths of Cuban cinema in the diaspora or in exile seem sad to me. If before, living in Cuba, we could reach the co-production markets without the financial support of our film institute, now, in the diaspora, we are doomed to make very precarious films. I see no future, to tell you the truth. Or maybe I do; maybe the future will be to make films that satisfy our creative impulses: tiny films, films that somehow replicate the push of the Cuban industry: nonexistent. Films that are shot in a courtyard, in a house, around a table. Things like that, gagged by poverty.

Poster of the IV INSTAR Film Festival (IMAGE Facebook / International Institute of Artivism "Hannah Arendt").

If, on the other hand, we think of cinema outside the diaspora category, without the difficulties that this implies, it is less complicated to conceive that any of us will succeed in making important films. In other words, a politicized diaspora vision impoverishes the imagination. It is like collectivizing the Cuban cinema of the diaspora. Or like giving it a dialectical condition, which walks towards the future with an immanent destiny. We should focus on managing economic aid for production and development, not of Cuban cinema, but of cinema, and that's it. In short, a mess.

Gloria Carrión

I had the honor of being a jury member for this year's PM Awards 2023 and, through this experience, I could understand the vitality that independent Cuban cinema has at this moment: I was very impressed with the diversity, strength, and courage of Cuban filmmakers. Premios PM 2023 de este año y pude, a través de esta experiencia, darme cuenta de la vitalidad que tiene en este momento el cine cubano independiente. Quedé muy impresionada con la diversidad, la fuerza y la valentía de los cineastas cubanos.

It seems to me that the adversity and challenges posed by exile to these artists is a kind of creative engine. Something that has left me very impressed is the flame lit in each of these filmmakers scattered around the world. Despite all the difficulties, despite all the persecution and censorship, they draw resources and build their own ways of narrating what they have lived, the reality of Cuba, both from the island and from exile. It seems to me that this power is a way of resisting, of continuing to narrate despite adversity. That is absolutely praiseworthy and necessary.

I also believe that the challenges being faced by Cuban artists in exile have a lot in common with what we Nicaraguan or Venezuelan filmmakers in exile are going through. There is a very powerful narrative potential and the possibility of dialogue between us and the possibility of finding new production schemes, new ways of telling stories, and new risks to take.

I always want to make it clear that for me exile is not only a limitation; it is also the possibility to rethink the limits of cinematographic language, and it is an opportunity to continue telling stories.

The INSTAR Film Festival plays a fundamental role in the promotion of subaltern cinema. I think spaces like INSTAR are very uncommon, especially if they have such a clear idea of promoting this type of cinema made in adversity, under persecution, under censorship, and in tremendously difficult contexts. In such a globalized world, so focused on profitability, I think this is commendable and urgent.

This type of cinema, which is not made amid comfort, is urgent, necessary, and must be seen, supported, and distributed. INSTAR achieves this mission with flying colors. I admire and applaud the work of curatorship, promotion, and sense of mission for/with subaltern filmmakers.

Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

Ricardo Figueredo

The INSTAR Film Festival is a kind of oasis for Cuban filmmakers who are in the diaspora and for many other filmmakers who do not find the ideal, appropriate, and natural space to promote their works. I think it's a brilliant idea and an act of faith and will of Tania [Bruguera] towards her filmmaking colleagues. It is something I will always be grateful for.

The festival seems to me, above all, an act of courage. I value and consider it very much. I hope that all countries that have problems with their cinematography have a person like Tania with this initiative to make a festival with films that nobody wants to show.

Cuban cinema is not in its best times. It is in a dark moment, as is the whole country. All of Cuba is under censorship and repression towards artists. It is very unfortunate what is happening in this context. I think INSTAR is a kind of beacon that shines a light on all this. It shows that it is not impossible to make a festival where the works of banned, marginalized filmmakers can be seen... It is also a way of striking a blow against dictatorial governments. I hope this festival lasts for many years.

Jhon Ciavaldini

The festival exudes a need to exist in the face of the increasing Cuban diaspora -the exodus of intellectuals and a generation of great filmmakers who have gained worldwide recognition-, censorship, and the lack of spaces within the country, even more so with the closing of the ICAIC Young Filmmaker Showcase.

I believe the organizers have managed to see that these needs and problems exist in other countries with authoritarian regimes, many of which are even allies of the Cuban state. This allows us to navigate the same waters, to have points in common, and therefore, the dialogue between our countries becomes more necessary. One way to do this is through our cinema, fighting against propaganda and censorship. The fact that my film, full of images of repression by the Venezuelan State, is available in Cuba and that someone can see it and contrast the image given by the official media of an allied regime, is something that fills me with great exaltation.

You can read the original note here

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Miguel Coyula and Rafael Ramírez: the multiverses of two Cuban auteurs

By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - december 9th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from ‘The Winter Campaigns’ (2019, Cuba-Venezuela-México); Rafael Ramírez (Picture Courtesy of the Festival de Cine INSTAR)

In his essay La Politique des auteurs, French critic André Bazin said: "The politics of auteurs consists, in short, in choosing the personal perspective in artistic creation as a standard of reference and assuming that it will progress from one film to the next. It is recognized that certain films of great quality escape this theory, but these will be considered systematically inferior to those that possess an author's personal stamp, no matter how mundane the setting may be".

Defining an auteur is still a complex and increasingly remote exercise in this 21st century. In Cuba, the concept became a definitive paradigm and an aspiration to the utmost; for many years, some disavowed any different way of assuming and consuming cinema.

Nevertheless, Bazin's ideas serve as a reference for the analysis of two Cuban filmmakers: Miguel Coyula and Rafael Ramirez. Both creators, with cinematic works validated by academies and film festivals, have several common traits, beyond "choosing a personal perspective in artistic creation", that denote the production of a constant and inspiring film poetics for their peers.

In the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, the directors were included in the special presentations with the feature films Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula 2021) and The Winter Campaigns (Rafael Ramirez, 2019). Coyula's film was screened this Friday, December 8, at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris, and Ramírez's film is being shown this Saturday at the e-flux Screening Room in Brooklyn, New York, and it is available until tomorrow for audiences in Cuba, on the online platform Festhome.

In The Winter Campaigns, Western prevails as a genre: it depicts the environment, the feelings, the strange, and, at the same time, consistent presence of the human being amid nature, in contrast to the dystopian science fiction and the end of the world envisioned in Blue Heart. In these fictional scenarios, Ramírez's characters have the certainty of the search; Coyula's, the conviction of helplessness. Thus, they appear before the camera, some with blurred faces, others showing discomfort and uneasiness. Each being in The Winter Campaigns seems to burst into the shot; each "freak" in Blue Heart wants to escape it.

Both directors have an extraordinary ability to reimagine scenarios. Ramirez, with strange cinematography and superlative color grading, in which gray symbolizes winter, the withered. Coyula, with the playful intensity offered by the spectrum of visual effects, all of which can be cut for the director/ editor/ VFX supervisor to reconfigure and recontextualize.

Both speak of this world. Both inhabit it. But they have decided to create other universes in their interior. Ramírez and Coyula seek cinematic narratives that transcend the conventional and the realistic. It is in the realm of imagination where they find their auteur language. A simple river is the river to hell; a building is the antenna that tunes in to the apocalypse.

In Hindu religions and philosophies, the soul is the first body, guide, and representation of the heart. In that sense, Ramirez's film can be defined as a path that seeks the different states of the soul. These same notions also pay much attention to the mind, which tends to identify with the ego, which always advocates an individuality apparently separated from the divine.

Still from ‘Blue Heart’ (2021); Miguel Coyula

In Blue Heart, the ways of the ego can be identified. But, in the search, it is good to move away from negative and preconceived judgments. Ego is an alarm, a warning for all of us to be aware of our origin, our roots, which the characters in Coyula's film are incessantly looking for.

From these places, both directors do not see the camera as a device for tracing realities but as a third eye that perceives altered states and intuitive essences, which may already be in the audiovisual composition or may be inserted later in the editing room. In either case, the pretext is the primordial reality; the aim is the construction of senses focused on the sensible, which inquire into the semiotically arbitrary relationship of things.

If anything distinguishes these two auteurs, is that everything can be re-signified through the act (or gesture) of filming. The camera is a ship bound for the multiverse; the shot is only a portal, a square within which the different dimensions unfold.

Each cosmos they create gives the sensation of starting from apparently closed contexts. But they expand with each viewing by the spectators. Ultimately, the characters in Blue Heart and The Winter Campaigns can be considered experiments in parallel realities. The difference between the two is that those in the former film are dissatisfied with such experimentation, while those in the latter wander through the spaces, convinced of its necessity. There is a willingness in the characters of The Winter Campaigns to accept an arranged, simulated destiny, as in a videogame. In the characters of Blue Heart, there is a predominant resistance to the immovable, to a destiny drawn by others.

Both authors find in genre cinema the ideal resource for the dismantling of all forms of power: history as a centralizing narrative in The Winter Campaigns, the political and ideological power of the Cuban government in Blue Heart.

The traditional association of science fiction and Westerns with entertainment is used by these films to dismantle, from a playful point of view, what is recognized as authoritarian.

Language, the word as a transnational device, is another distinctive element in Rafael Ramírez and Miguel Coyula. Each language, composed of characteristic sounds, has diverse rhythms and cadences that enrich the narratives of their films. And they situate them in the vast international cinema landscape while, at the same time, constituting intellectual returns of their respective influences and backgrounds.

Still from ‘The Winter Campaigns’ (2019, Cuba-Venezuela-México); Rafael Ramírez

For these auteurs, cinema is a territory with no rigid delimitations, even when their films fall into a "generic" classification. For Coyula and Ramírez, cinema, as a language, is a repository of their creativity and their ways of apprehending the world. Their cosmogonies drink from the literature they create, the anime and video games they consume, and the dissimilar knowledge they transmute into filmic narratives.

You can read the original note here

Miguel Coyula y Rafael Ramirez Read More »

Experimental short films by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde

By Pablo Gamba – december 10th, 2023

LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE

A program of experimental films by the Villaverdes made between 1970 and 1978 in the United States was part of the INSTAR Film Festival. It included the short films 'Poor Cinderella, Still Ironing Her Husband Shirt' (1978) and 'To My Father’ (1973), by Miñuca Villaverde, 'Apollo Man to the Moon' (1970), and 'A Lady's Home Journal' (1972), by Fernando Villaverde. In addition, Miñuca Villaverde's medium-length documentary 'Tent City' (1980) was also screened.
 
The Villaverdes were part of the ICAIC and supporters of the Cuban Revolution until 1965. That year, the tensions between filmmakers and power that run through the history of the Cuban Film Institute led them to decide to leave the country, convinced that their place could not be in the socialist system that was being built in Cuba. 
 
Fernando Villaverde produced one of the short films of the ICAIC's take-off period, 'The Park' (1963), whose melancholic characters living in a square clashed with the enthusiasm that the political cadres aspired the cinema to spread. The situation became more difficult for the filmmaker for similar reasons when he finished 'Elena' (1965), his contribution to the frustrated collective feature 'A Little Bit More Blue'. The abortion of his first feature film as director, 'The Sea', finally drove him into exile along with his wife, who also worked at ICAIC as a scriptwriter and as an actress, such as in 'Elena'.
 
When they settled in New York, after trying to establish themselves in Paris, the Villaverdes bought a film camera. They did so inspired, in particular, by Jonas Mekas, in whose cinematheque they may have found the new cinema they could not make in Cuba. The short films in the program stand out for their appropriation of the American underground.
'Poor Cinderella...' is a film that may well aspire to become part of a historical canon of Latin American experimental cinema if such a thing is ever defined. It is a recycled short film made with discarded material from another Miñuca Villaverde film, 'Blanca Putica: A Girl in Love' (1978). The way the filmmaker worked with collage, the intervention and fragmentation of the film material, the copying, and the rhythm, makes me think of Malcolm Le Griece's work as an antecedent, and of what Peter Tscherkassky would do later on.
 
The filmmaker's mastery of techniques is remarkable. But if Le Griece highlighted the work of physical intervention, laboratory procedures, and re-shooting as characteristic of one aspect of structural cinema. Miñuca Villaverde's short film is marked by a tension between this exploration of materiality and the artisanal wisdom of cinema, on the one hand, and the body and sexuality of women, on the other. Carolee Schneeman is an obvious reference in this other sense, since it is a film about a woman making love. But the title, the intervention, the fragmentation, and the abstract montage, based on repetitions, point disturbingly in a direction opposite to sexual liberation. 
 
This sensibility for pleasure, but also questioning and even rebellious, if you will, contrasts the look at the father and the family gathered around him in his Texas home when he was about to die in 'To My Father'. It is obviously a film of the daughter's love, but also of observation of bodies and group dynamics.
 
Miñuca Villaverde films in moments ranging from the pose in front of the camera, in a curious "family photo" for cinema, to the presence of the same characters in the garden, enjoying their bodies under the sun, while the protagonist is shown there in an extension chair, with a dreadful look that made me believe he could have expired without anyone around him noticing as if there had not even been someone seeing him behind the camera that records him.
That is what 'To My Father' is about: the fragility of life, which can go from one moment to the next in certain circumstances, and the possibility that cinema has to record moments of a person's life so they can be replayed forever. This is a short film about a family and about how a film can give us the illusion, so humanly necessary, that it is possible to overcome death and bring back the living image of those it has taken away, which is conjugated here with the contrast between black and white and color.
 
In the last part of 'To My Father’, there is a record of a trip, presumably the return from Texas, made from a car that races along highways. It constructs a representation of the landscape as an alien territory crossed at high speed. This brings me to comment on the first of Fernando Villaverde's short films in the exhibition: 'Apollo Man to the Moon'.
 
Departing from the path of the feelings of the exiles in the United States towards the country they left, like those of the Cuban diaspora film classic 'El Súper' (1979) by León Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, the filmmaker chooses to investigate the foreigner's gaze on a New York that appears strange, inhospitable, and therefore, loaded with ironies regarding the promise of freedom of "America". He lucidly expresses this in a shot of the iconic statue, distorted by the low-light registration and the motifs of the moon in a sky where the night has not closed in and the arrival of the first American astronauts.
 
Melancholic characters like those in 'The Park' are seen again in this film. However, contrary to what happens in the Cuban short, they are dehumanized by their movement as a uniform mass through corridors and escalators. Thus 'Apollo Man the Moon' is presented as a bitter parody of the vibrant urban symphonies of the avant-garde. This includes the contrast between the exterior space and the interior domestic space of a family that seems to be from another planet.
Irony is the element that might link 'Apollo Man to the Moon' to 'A Lady's Home Journal', another film that should be included in the utopian Latin American experimental canon. It is a feminist film in which Fernando Villaverde identifies himself as a filmmaker in collaboration with his wife. In it, they explore the clash between the image required of women "in society”, as they say, which is a patriarchal environment in which the dominant gaze is that of men, and the attempts to escape towards the creation of other images, in a space that is not even the "home" of the title, the domestic sphere, but in the privacy of the bathroom, and sometimes also a bedroom, in solitude.
 
But the interior space in this short film is also terrible. It can be a microcosm that reproduces the world from whose gaze the protagonist tries to escape. The abyss re-opens before her in the bathroom itself, where she works on her body, preparing it for public display, and in a scene with her lying on the floor, like a return to childhood, playing in a room with the dollhouse in its modern 1960s educational version by Fisher-Price. 
 
A surprisingly topical aspect of this short film is the display of various incongruent facets of the protagonist's self. There is another part in which she is presented as a gypsy tarot reader and in another as a dancer of disturbing eroticism with a tattooed body, as an angel who is like a romantic girl in love but also literally labeled as a gardener. This correlates to the contrast between realistic lighting in some parts and stark chiaroscuro in others, as well as different musical themes. Unlike the montage that divides the short into segments, the music segments overlap at times, adding complexity to this multifaceted yet claustrophobic representation of the self.
Just as it is ironic that this quest of the woman to be herself, to give herself her own image, leads to versions of herself that do not fail to correspond to male expectations, it is also ironic that she is always shown here for the gaze of another behind the camera, who is a man. Behind that, there is even another male gaze, the male gaze of the spectator. I believe that in this sense, it is necessary to interpret the shots in which the character of Miñuca Villaverde disappears and reappears and flickers in the image because the only possible place of encounter with herself is a gaze for no one, a non-gaze, in short, invisibility.
 
It is worth highlighting the contrast between 'Poor Cinderella...' and 'A Lady's Home Journal' and the prudishness that has always characterized Cuban cinema within the framework of State institutions -not that of independent filmmakers such as Jorge Molina, to mention a fairly well-known example-. That is another reason why the Villaverdes may have distanced themselves from a Revolution that was insufficiently open in depth of feelings and not revolutionary at all, in terms of bodies. But if socialism in Cuba failed to produce a "New Man" -and the use of the expression exclusively in the masculine is no coincidence-, the transformation that Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde began as part of while on the island crystallized making them a couple of new filmmakers in New York.
 
This also marks the gaze of Tent City, a short film by Miñuca Villaverde in another stage of her life, when they moved from New York to Miami. It is an emergency cinema film. It records a group of Cubans who arrived by the thousands in the United States in the so-called "Mariel exodus" in 1980, installed under a bridge in a "camp" of military tents.

The government of the island described these migrants as "lumpen" and "social scum". The filmmaker goes beyond denying this with her gaze and recorded testimonies to become an accomplice of several of these immigrants in the free expression of their bodies' dissidence from Cuba's socialist system regarding their homosexuality and transvestism. 'Tent City' is therefore not only an urgent but also a characteristically underground film, marked by a sensibility ahead of its time in the Latin American context. In addition to preceding it, this is how it distinguishes itself from the paradoxical conventional representation of another classic of Cuban exile cinema: 'Improper Conduct' (1984), by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal.

You can read the original note here

Cortos experimentales Read More »

Mafifa', by Cuban Daniela Muñoz Barroso: Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award at the IV INSTAR Film Festival

By RIALTA STAFF - december 10th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Mafifa' (2021); Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Vimeo Estudio ST).

The feature documentary Mafifa (2021), by Cuban filmmaker Daniela Muñoz Barroso, unanimously won the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award at the IV INSTAR Film Festival. Likewise, the film 'Option Zero' (2020), by Cuban director Marcel Beltrán, received a special mention.

The award's verdict defines 'Mafifa' -whose premiere was at the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA)- as the work that best reflects and explores, among the fifteen contestants, "a taboo theme of its corresponding society". The decision took into account, above all, "the conceptual and artistic quality of the works in relation to their thematic proposals," says the brief statement released this Sunday afternoon.

The jury for this edition, consisting of Dunja Fehimović (Bosnia and Herzegovina), professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Newcastle, film critic and historian Paulo A. Paranagua (Brazil), and screenwriter and writer Alejandro Hernández (Cuba), highlighted "the quality and diversity of the selected films, as well as the opportunity to approach different cinematographies of the global south, which do not always have the presence they deserve in the traditional circuits of audiovisual exhibition and distribution".

In addition, according to the official announcement, "it recognized the resilience, courage, and inventiveness of filmmakers in overcoming their adverse production circumstances and delivering films that profoundly question their respective socio-political contexts".

The honored filmmakers will receive US$3,000 (Muñoz Barroso) and US$1,500 (Beltrán), respectively, which corresponds to the award sponsored by the "Hannah Arendt" International Institute of Artivism.

During the live broadcast of the award, Brazilian Paranagua highlighted the filmic power of 'Mafifa', which he considered "an authentic revelation". He was impressed both by the search, among the mists of collective memory, for the character of Mafifa, a legendary conga player in Santiago de Cuba, and by the intimate search undertaken, in turn, by Daniela Muñoz Barroso herself.

"It is a film that I find very intense, very powerful, very emotional, and at the same time, very lucid. It is a film that has touched me a lot," confessed the prestigious film expert, visibly emotional.

Poster for 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Courtesy of the IV INSTAR Film Festival).

"I cannot hide how it touches my heart and how, at the same time, I am in awe to see the intelligence of the filmmaker and her team," he added. "I am very grateful for the chance to have seen it, and I hope that you too, many of you, can see it soon."

About Beltrán's 'Option Zero' (Jury Prize at MiradasDoc 2022), Fehimović stated that it "exemplifies the evolution of documentaries with new technologies, and the testimonial and artistic value that [these] provide, in the hands of a thoughtful and creative director.”

On the other hand, the England-based academic emphasized that "by insisting on recognizing works that deal with taboo subjects, the festival reminds us that cinema is conditioned and responds to very specific and precise contexts. The works in competition, all of them of very high quality, demonstrate and stage this dynamic".

Poster of 'The Zero Option'; Marcel Beltrán (IMAGE Courtesy of interviewee)

"It seems of utmost importance to me the work of the INSTAR Film Festival in spreading and promoting the cinema of young Cuban creators, above all, in light of the disappearance of the Young Filmmaker's Showcase, which was, for many years, a fundamental critical space for so many, including several of the filmmakers whose works have competed for this award," Fehimović reflected. "However, this edition of the festival proposes something that reflects perhaps, even better, the evolution, or the current state of Cuban cinema, or its younger practitioners [:] I refer to the transnational focus of the programming and screenings, which highlights an expansive vision of Cuban cinema, connected to the rest of the world and to international socio-political dynamics and creative trends."

Afterward, Cuban artivist Tania Bruguera - INSTAR's director and main promoter of this festival - thanked both the filmmakers who lent their works and the audiences who went to theaters in cities such as Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo, Paris, New York, and Miami.

She also thanked those who connected from Cuba (more than a hundred views) to watch the films programmed through the online platform Festhome.

"We know how difficult it is to access the Internet and how expensive”, the artist said. "This festival was created for the Cuban audience, and we will always have that as one of our main points of focus."

Finally, Bruguera announced that INSTAR has received proposals from three other cities worldwide to organize exhibitions of the event next year. The purpose, she noted, is to continue to grow and, likewise, to attract more foreign filmmakers.

"We want it to be a party and a meeting place and a space for serious and important discussions for filmmakers," she said.

You can read the original note here

Mafifa de la cubana Daniela Munoz Read More »

The Holy Family. Lineages and legacies at the IV INSTAR Film Festival.

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS - december 9th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'The music of the spheres' (2018); Marcel Beltrán.

The authors of many films that were part of the official selection of the IV INSTAR Film Festival take the family as a great device to understand themselves as cultural, historical, emotional, political, and social subjects. They are children of dreams dreamed by others, amid circular ruins.

The family is then a surrealistic mirror of Magritte in which they contemplate their backs, scrutinize the past, and find ancient questions to articulate the doubts of the present. As if it were a great sphinx that never ceases to challenge them with numerous and simultaneous enigmas.

Group self-portraits

The documentaries 'To My Father' (Miñuca Villaverde, 1973), 'The Music of the Spheres' (Marcel Beltrán, 2018), 'The Son of the Dream' (Alejandro Alonso, 2016), 'The Pure Ones' (Carla Valdés León, 2021), and the Haitian fiction 'Agwe' (Samuel Suffren, 2022) are true group self-portraits, cartographies of pre-existence, prophecies of the past, diaries of the self-discovery of a multiple identity.

Still from 'To My Father', a film by Miñuca Villaverde (IMAGE Vimeo)

Included in the festival, and this review, as a fundamental antecedent, Villaverde's film -one of the first approaches to family archive cinema by a Cuban filmmaker- reviews the last images of the recently deceased father. At the same time, it seems to register the intimate desperation with which one rushes to fix the memories of the cardinal being who has just disappeared, the fear that the existence of the deceased will be diluted in the merciless anonymity that has devoured billions of lives, and with it, all the connotations, the symbols of a time that persisted in his flesh. It is the astonishment before the irremissible awareness of the transmutation of the present into the past.

With the disappearance of her father, the last possible affective anchor to the Cuba that Miñuca Villaverde left behind years before, with her husband Fernando, vanishes. So, she also hurries to fix the memory of Cuba in her film. In exile, the father expanded into a nation. The affection she professes for him has unfolded into a patriotism not assumed as the suicidal devotion of propaganda and epic, but as the soft security that inspires the mere mention of the national name, the comfort of the group in which the same language is spoken, or the coherent idea we have of ourselves when we define ourselves as Cubans.

In 'The Pure Ones’, an aesthetic legatee of 'To My Father', Carla Valdés León deploys an evocative exercise and a generational dissection through the cinematographic record of an eminently familiar experience, turning us into privileged spectators of the construction of memory. The filmmaker inherits her parents' memories, assimilates them, converts them into the foundations of her own reminiscences, and constructs her perception.

Still (detail) from 'Los puros' (2019); Carla Valdés (IMAGE Facebook / Ciervo Encantado).

Throughout the film, Carla Valdés León contrasts images of her parents' youth and herself as a child, preserved in old slides and videotapes. Her adult gaze brings an inevitable, though affectionate, judgment. It is a necessary gesture to understand the influence of the family past on her personal present and to discern the role of her lineage in the contemporaneity they share.

Carla and her parents, Yohanka and Félix, philosophy professors, have witnessed the collapse of utopias and sociopolitical paradigms, experienced the collapse of illusions and collective hallucinations, and lived through the resulting crisis of values. While filming them with several former classmates, all recalling their experiences and surprises when they studied in the Soviet Union during perestroika, Valdés León stands in front of Magritte's mirror. She testifies in silence, out of field, her relationship with the present of Cuba, forced and stubborn heiress of the Soviet legacy.

Still from 'El hijo del sueño' (2016); Alejandro Alonso (IMAGE Vimeo / Via: rialta.org/).

'The Son of the Dream' and 'Agwe', on the other hand, set out to interrogate migrant ghosts, beings who left their homelands and their own bodies before Alejandro Alonso and Samuel Suffren's time, but who continue to be inescapable presences. They have conditioned the family histories, and they define the respective presents.

Alonso and his parents daydream about his uncle Julio Alonso who, like Miñuca Villaverde and her father (like the filmmaker himself would do decades later), left Cuba. Already at that time, the regime decreed the immediate spectral condition of the "traitors" who abandoned paradise. The island was the only officially accepted reality. Outside its shore, awaited oblivion, the annulment of identity, and even of the human condition itself.

With 'The Son of the Dream', Alonso tries to reconstruct his uncle as a certainty, to give his memory the tangibility of the celluloid with which the film is shot: it allows him to be embodied in something concrete, palpable, like the postcards and letters he sent to his family - proof of the possibility of life beyond Cuba. He ends up recovering an inconsistent part of his past, he manages to reveal as much as possible about one of the vague, nebulous edges of his lineage, which hinders his self-perception.

The muted voice of the uncle must recover its tone and words so that the ancestral framework of identity is complete. His uncle must disappear as torment and re-emerge as calm.

Suffren dedicates the film to his father, who left Haiti decades ago and never returned. The sea denied him the chance to reach the prosperous lands he once vowed to conquer. The filmmaker's loss is shared by many Haitians and many other citizens of the rest of the world who have seen their families mutilated by the exile.

The lack of records or testimonies about the journey, the possible shipwreck, and the final fate of his father forced him to recreate one of the many possibilities. Suffren opts for fiction and gives his story an allegorical dimension.

The Agwe child becomes a collective character, an orphan totality, a global longing. All these children of absence, heirs to the desperate migratory impulses that ruled the lives of their ancestors, are the tender and sad endings of countless interrupted love stories. Their lineage is that of flight; their future is a doubt scattered in the waters of the world.

From 'Agwe' (Haiti, 2022); Samuel Suffren (IMAGE estivaldecineinstar.com)

Family, race, racism

'The Music of the Spheres' follows paths close to Suffren's film, as it deals with the fatalisms of raciality in the Caribbean, which seal the fate of millions, victims of the persistence of colonialism, its ways, hierarchies, and racist foundations.

Marcel Beltrán's feature film is a sort of journey to the seed, an exploration of the routes his parents traveled from the heart of their families, their youth, decisions, and loves until the births of the filmmaker and his brother Darío. Like 'Agwe', the film is also a love story, but it approaches this feeling as a sublimation of the personal consequence of the characters. The filmmaker's coming into the world is an emancipatory gesture.

Cuba is a racist country; it has not ceased to be so. A few generations separate us from centuries of slavery. It is also, increasingly, a classist country.

Poster of 'La música de las esferas'; Marcel Beltrán (IMAGE Courtesy of the interviewee)

Marcel's life has directly challenged such assumptions: it is the result of the rupture with inherited discrimination as a reflex. His mother, white and a descendant of an affluent middle-class family, fell in love with his father, black and from a humble family. It is a situation as elementary as it is essential to decode the racial and racist logic of the nation.

In the documentary film 'Roads of Lava' (Gretel Marín, 2023), the small family composed by Afibola Sifunola and her young son Olorun Sile travel in reverse the same path proposed by 'The Music of the Spheres': it records moments in the process of shaping the identity of the protagonist child, instructed by his mother, his first and defining teacher.

Afibola seeks to make him aware of his place in history early on as the heir of a collective lineage, of a culture segregated by the survival of racist colonial canons, but, at the same time, she seeks to provide Olorun with a powerful agency that can only be achieved through a clear understanding of the past.

The child's future is unpredictable, but his self-recognition as a socio-cultural and political subject will help him build a project of destiny, an ideal of life closer to fulfillment. Afibola embodies an ancestral force that supports but does not indoctrinate, even if her discourse always verges on militancy. Olorun's past has survived due to her resilience. The eternal battle for prevalence and dignity leaves deep, numerous scars.

Still from 'Camino de lava' (2023); Gretel Marín

Families and abysses

The fictions 'Blue Heart' (Miguel Coyula, 2021) and 'The Rodeo' (Carlos Melián, 2021) invite (tempt) us to travel through the dark side of the family, assumed respectively as a biological aberration and a canceled lineage.

Coyula's feature film proposes a biopunk dystopia, existential and sardonic, at the same time, in which a desperate Fidel Castro decides to create a race of "new" men and women, of "super revolutionaries", by manipulating their own DNA. A group of women are impregnated in vitro without their consent, and the repression of will - not only the dream of reason - can only produce monsters.

The terrorist mutants that shake the foundations of a future Cuba still controlled by the Castro regime are the result of the instrumentalization of the family, of the utilitarian kinship fostered without regard for the affective links that end up defining the family more forcefully as a consensual, balanced sentimental network.

The Castro of the film assumes lineage as a method of perpetuation ad infinitum and caste as an obedient extension of his senses and limbs. He pursues immortality and ubiquity through genetic replication, through the cloning of his will. It disdains the uniqueness of each individual. It denies the -Marcusian- tendency of the progeny to defy the progenitors, to demand that they surrender their temporary reign over the world.

Still from 'Corazón azul', Miguel Coyula, dir., 2021

The Blue Heart family model is the most retrograde, sick, and tragic, but quite common throughout human history. Gestating implies infinite responsibilities for the parents and no obligations for the children. Producing offspring to guarantee status and power can only lead to a biological variant of slavery.

'The Rodeo', on the other hand, is the abyss that observes those who look at it for too long. In its tenebrous center nestles a family whose future is mutilated after the death of the firstborn. The elderly Niña and José have lived an existence besieged by impossibility and frustration, symbolized by the islet where they reside, which was once the highest point of a town that drowned in an artificial dam. Now, it is a castaway's den.

The death of the son severs his last chance to pass on something to the world. José tried to build a rodeo in town, as explained throughout the story, but failure sealed his project. The descendant was unable to expand his hopes, have any joy, or fulfill himself where his parents failed. The family is also the journey through time of a collective possibility, revitalized in each generation. The interruption of this journey annuls for many the meaning of existence.

Niña and José are as desperate as the Fidel Castro that Coyula imagines. Life has taken care of sterilizing and isolating them. All roads are cut off. Their past lies underwater, their future underground. They are marginalized beings in a corner of time; the only thing left for them to do is to decide when and how to die. They are also victims of the narrow conception of the family as direct consanguinity, for around them swarm the affection of other relatives and friends who accompany their departure, who will remember them.

Still from 'El rodeo' (2021); Carlos Melián (Vimeo IMAGE / Estudio ST - Trailer)

The family is a ghost that haunts Cuban cinema. It torments and redeems. It terrifies and soothes. It alerts and reassures. It is beginning and end. It is a multiple path. Obsession and calm. Life and death. Sound and fury...

You can read the original note here

La sagrada familia Read More »

The portrait of Mafifa. Conversation with filmmaker Daniela Muñoz Barroso

By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - december 8th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Mafifa' (2021); Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGEN estudiostcuba.com)

Mafifa and Daniela have memory in common. The former still runs the risk of not being part of the historical narrative; the latter uses memory to understand the world and herself. This is one of Ariadne's threads that united and allowed them to meet in the labyrinth that was the shooting, the construction of the documentary film ‘Mafifa'.

The audiovisual work is part of the selection of the IV INSTAR Film Festival and can be seen this Friday, December 8, at Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona, Spain; on Saturday, December 9, at the Centro Cultural General San Martín, in Buenos Aires, and on Sunday, December 10, it will be available again -after last Tuesday's session- on the online platform Festhome.

Cuban filmmaker Daniela Muñoz Barroso talked to Rialta News about how the paths of these two women intersect.

If you had to talk about your role in Mafifa, would you talk about sincerity or exposure? Why?

I believe that my role in the film was a kind of natural bridge to connect with the character of Mafifa or with the idea of who this woman might have been. In the beginning, as always, we didn't know what film would emerge; I just knew that I was very interested in building a portrait of this woman, and that's where I started the research, the questions, person to person, trying to find someone who had met her... That research set me on a journey, and in that journey, I found a city unknown to me, which captivated me mainly because of its sounds, noises, and strength. As I asked about Mafifa, the woman, the question bounced back in different ways to me and to the other women I met on that trip. They were questions that created and linked points in common among all these people, but above all, among the women - and not only those I met along the way, but also those who were with me at the time, Leila [Montero], Glenda [Martínez Cabrera], Carlos [Melián] and, later in the montage, Joanna [Montero]. So, besides sincerity or exposure, I would speak of impulses, of energies. I think participating or appearing in the film was a way for me to answer those questions and for us to accompany each other on that journey.

Daniela Muñoz Barroso, Cuban filmmaker (PHOTO estivaldecineinstar.com)

I don't know if I'm explaining myself. Sometimes I get abstract... There was a definitive fact that made me appear in the film: the idea that I couldn't hear the bell of Mafifa. Starting from this point, the journey began to take other forms for all this could mean. The absence of... the trace of... the search for...

The Cuban West, the place where you were born, and the East, the place you visited, are part of the same nation, but they have differences in their lives and culture. Was this a factor taken into account during the shooting and the subsequent editing of the film?

They are parts of the same nation but very distant from each other. In the trips to Santiago during the Carnivals or to Villa Clara during Parrandas, I always found something very real, the face of an island that enters a trance in these festivities and shows itself as it is. I had a feeling that in those moments, I could access a part of history or the past. In the act of recreating tradition, I connected with a Cuba that once was and of which little remains. During these popular festivities, the present Cuba and the Cuba that could have been come into very direct contact. I circle back to abstractions. I feel that there is a collective subconscious that goes into a trance and frees itself from all its pains through dance, alcohol, religion, and music, and perhaps that is why this trance has movement and is so intense: because there is a kind of search, also to let go of something. For me, that is the conga or the fire of a parranda. And sound is a fundamental factor here because it describes that trance, accompanies it, and sometimes even plays a leading role in it.

Scene from 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Courtesy of the IV INSTAR Film Festival).

In Havana, I could also find some reality and truth, of course, but not the ones I am interested in portraying, perhaps because many people have done it before. So I always prefer to go to the margins, to listen to the stories of people who are different from me and who have a lot to contribute to me as a human being, as a documentarist, and also as a Cuban. I always feel that in 'Mafifa' there were many things left unsaid, there were ideas planted that show their little heads in the ground, and there are those who see it and those who don't. I always thought of going to Santiago and continuing shooting; even after a month of filming, I went to coast towns, many of which are threatened to be flooded by the sea... And there, for example, I met a beautiful woman who lives in a small town called Mar Verde, where the hurricanes have destroyed everything, and the people who remain there do not want to leave, but they know the risk it represents. But I had decided at that moment to continue the trip completely alone, and not to film, just to listen…

I went back to Havana with the idea of sorting all the material, working on a script, and returning to Santiago, but COVID-19 came... And well... The rest is common knowledge.

It's often seen as 'normal' for filmmakers to take on field production, especially in films that can be classified as documentaries. In your vast experience in this field as well, do you think the roles of producer and director get 'confused'? 

I always get confused, that's why I always try to get Leila to join me, hahaha. Producer Daniela produces other projects, but very little or poorly for herself. I feel that sometimes I don't give my projects the time they need. But, well, luckily, Estudio ST is not just me. We are a creative group and, at the moment of truth, we can count on each other.

During the shoot, I always try to be with one other person, a very intimate crew, and sometimes I'm even by myself. But other times, I feel that the best would be having three people: a sound technician, a producer/assistant director, and me, directing and shooting. We all participate in the journey and in guiding the way.

Before and after the shoot, it's much easier for me to produce, to think about a financial strategy, a schedule, a crew, etc.

Still from 'Mafifa', Daniela Muñoz Barroso, dir., 2021.
Scene from 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Courtesy of the IV INSTAR Film Festival).

The reconstruction of female characters in cinema is a path between discovery and vindication; which comes first to you in 'Mafifa'?

The encounter! I mean, I guess it would be the discovery, but I don't like to say "discover" because all these women were already there with their lives and their wonderful stories. For me, that moment of meeting the other person and getting to know each other is fascinating. Then comes that need to capture their imprint in the time capsule that is cinema.

The concept of 'tradition' or 'traditional' is something that captures your attention as a filmmaker. Would you always approach it from a questioning perspective or the reconstruction of historical memory? 

I think I unintentionally answered a little bit of this question earlier. It's a combination of both. I think it has to do with understanding a little bit of where we come from. What those traditions hold about what we were before and what we are now, and why. I try to understand history as a being that inhabits the present and with which I collide and converse. Also, as a way of being me here and now.

You can read the original note here

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Alejandro Alonso's 'Home' and ‘The Son of the Dream': the ground our cinema treads on

By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - december 7th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'El hijo del sueño' (2016); Alejandro Alonso (IMAGE Vimeo / Via: rialta.org/).

"We learn to see ourselves through photography," is one of the best-known phrases in Susan Sontag's essay 'On Photography'. However, in the work of Cuban filmmaker Alejandro Alonso, there seems to be an express desire to unlearn to recognize ourselves through photography, through moving images. There we find marks, stains, and obscurities that perhaps come from the oneiric world.

Some of Alonso's films could also be related to the phrase that begins José Martí's essay 'Our America': "The vain villager believes that the whole world is his village". The dialogue between Martí's words and the images of ‘Home’ (2019) and 'The Son of the Dream' (2016) would construct other possible worlds, mixed identities, undefined forms of the conscious.

Both films are part of the special presentation program of the IV INSTAR Film Festival. They are available until December 10 on the online platform Festhome and will be screened at the e-fluxScreening Room in Brooklyn, New York, this Saturday, December 9.

The Cuban director has always been interested in the intervention of the image, moving or still, that opens portals to a more sensitive, less linear, more deconstructively circular understanding. Deeply rehearsed concepts and notions, such as nation, identity, or mother, find in these two films an incisive counterpoint.

Mother and homeland are not just words, or are they? 'The Son of the Dream' went to a country with numerous towns named Cuba, but he did not find his nationality there. The sound, and therefore the word, shapes the world. The words illustrate the feelings, and the images - selected by the filmmaker - are the mind that wanders, unable to discern clearly.

Memory is essential to narrate dreams, to create the nation. The homeland is sometimes as detached with its children as a mother; that is why it is important that these postcards are not given away, that they do not run the risk of falling into other hands, into another story... Postcards are the material link between mother and child. Between a citizen and his nation of origin.

According to yogic philosophy, we all have a certain number of breaths. 'In The Son...', these inhalations are a winding mechanism with its own rhythm and a limited number of turns.

There are several ways to navigate this world. Memory can be one, but this memory is often mixed with futile precisions, dates, and coordinates. These are, ultimately, small guides to something transitory, ornaments of a diffuse image that seeks to appeal to feeling, to the reconstruction of another meaning, of another homeland.

What is an idea? On the subtle level, the idea is pure thought. Prematurely, an idea becomes a prejudice. After too long, the idea becomes something over-analyzed that does not materialize. Cinema as an idea-making device is another feature that defines these two works by Alonso.

"Home", for Spanish speakers, means "casa" (house). Likewise, the word "homeland" is translated into Spanish as "Patria": in this symbolic path, physical elements such as land are lost, as well as the direct allusion to home. According to the online version of the British Collins dictionary, the word "homeland" is used to designate the country where you are born or the one you make your home. To immerse oneself in Alonso's films, it is important to highlight this second meaning: to make it home.

"Home", for Spanish speakers, is "casa". Likewise, the word "homeland" is translated into Spanish as "Patria": in this symbolic path, physical elements such as land are lost, as well as the direct allusion to home. According to the online version of the British Collins dictionary, the word "homeland" is used to designate the country where you are born or the one you make your home. To dive into Alonso's films, it is important to highlight this second meaning: to make it home.

In both 'Home' and 'The Son of the Dream', the footage induces us to take action, to believe and reconfigure what each individual should call "home", and how pertinent it is or is not to substitute the sensation of the domestic, of the warmth of home, for the abstract immensity posed by the word "homeland". The filmmaker's uncle, Julio César, decided that his ultimate home would be his family, his mother. So his nephew Alejandro rebuilds that bridge and then wonders in 'Home' if it was necessary to destroy it at some point or if it still remains.

Only through the intervention of images can the director approach these questions, dreaming of knowing himself: to propose that our essence be imagined beyond a simple nominal act or an arbitrary physical, geographical limit.

According to Sontag, "photographs transcribed on film cease to be collectible objects, as they are even when presented in books."[i]

They may not be collectible themselves, but the stories they create, the histories they illuminate, are. They are transmuted into remnants of materialized dreams, even if in the 21st century we have the impression that they will turn to dust in the wind with just a delete. And, in one way or another, they remain in a place of memory. At least, that is what happens with these films by Alejandro Alonso. Each uneasiness produced by a distorted image, each recollection of a shot, remains there, mixing in the unconscious as kundalini energy that will awake from the root to the soul.

[i] [i] Sontag Susan. On photography. Free epub. Digital edition: Titivillus. 2016, p. 9. Sobre la fotografía. Epub libre. Edición digital: Titivillus. 2016, pág. 9.

You can read the original note here

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FILMES DEL FESTIVAL INSTAR DISPONIBLES PARA VER GRATIS DESDE CUBA

Por Yadiris Luis Fuentes – 06 diciembre, 2023

adn CUBA

Las películas exhibidas en el IV Festival de Cine Instar podrán verse desde Cuba de manera gratuita a través de la aplicación de FesthomeTV

INSTAR/Facebook | IV Festival de Cine de INSTAR

The films shown at the IV Film Festival organized by the International Institute of Artivism "Hannah Arendt" (Instar) can be seen from Cuba free of charge through the FesthomeTV application, a service for sending short and feature films over the Internet.

Los interesados podrán bajar la app desde Google Play y disfrutar de unas 24 películas sin la censura del régimen cubano.

El propio servicio comunicó a través de su perfil de Instagram que el visionado de los filmes sería gratis para quienes vivan en la isla, los interesados también pueden encontrar las películas a través del enlace: https://tv.festhome.com/festivaltv/instar-film-festival.

FesthomeTV, como indica su sitio web, “es servicio de envío de cortometrajes y largometrajes a través de Internet” y “sustituye al ya obsoleto sistema de envío por correo, adaptándose a las nuevas tecnologías de Internet y ofreciendo al mismo tiempo la más alta calidad de selección de todas las plataformas de envío en línea”.

El IV Festival de Cine Instar que culmina el próximo 10 de diciembre ha sido atacado por los medios de propaganda del régimen cubano y algunos funcionarios culturales.

Un texto publicado en La Jiribilla  difama el evento y al cineasta Eliecer Jiménez Almeida. 

Se define, además, el festival como un “proyecto subversivo que pretende pasar como privativo de luchadores cubanos contra el totalitarismo, y que, en realidad, es financiado por las agencias de inteligencia de Estados Unidos y ha sido organizado por Tania Bruguera”.

También Bruguera y Jiménez Almeida fueron difamados por el ministro de Cultura, Alpidio Alonso, en su perfil de X.  

“¿En nombre de qué libertad, a no ser la de destruir la Revolución, puede pedirse que nos entendamos con quienes hacen parte de esta nueva operación pagada por la CIA contra el proyecto colectivo del pueblo cubano? ¿Qué patriota podría llamar nuestro al cine contrarrevolucionario?”, escribió Alonso.

Otros históricos censores y funcionarios del régimen como Abel Prieto y Rogelio Polanco atacaron, igualmente, al festival de Instar.

You can read the original note here

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Cartel de INSTAR

TODA LA LUZ QUE HAGA FALTA. IV FESTIVAL DE CINE INSTAR

Por Boris Heredia Abrahantes – 06 diciembre, 2023

el TOQUE

La cuarta edición del Festival de Cine Instar arrancó el lunes 4 de diciembre de 2023 en diversas sedes a lo largo del mundo y se desarrollará de forma híbrida hasta el 10 del mes en curso. 

In addition to the complicated reception of independent productions, as they live in an almost residual distribution area, Instar's films suffer an extra pressure due to the explicit content of the message they disseminate. This pressure is explained, as it has been happening in recent years, through censorship, that shameful tool that is so close to totalitarian governments.

La torpe habilidad del Gobierno cubano, del Ministerio de Cultura (Mincult), de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (Uneac) y del Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Icaic) para atacar la producción independiente que se sale de los llamados parámetros revolucionarios logra aislar a los realizadores a tal punto que termina excluyéndolos e, incluso, sacándolos del país. Lo anterior, unido al fenómeno migratorio que sufre la sociedad cubana en la actualidad, ha afectado de manera notable la presencia de varios de los realizadores jóvenes en la isla. El Festival de Cine Instar ha logrado que la zona de exclusión se convierta en una oportunidad para que los proyectos no solo puedan reforzarse en el exilio, sino que expandan su mensaje desde el exterior. 

Una de las particularidades de esta edición del festival tiene que ver precisamente con la extensión de las sedes y la participación de realizadores de países que también sufren bajo la sombra del totalitarismo de las dictaduras o de los Gobiernos autoritarios. Cortometrajes de Venezuela, Nicaragua, Irán y Haití compiten junto a producciones cubanas coproducidas en algunos casos en Estados Unidos, Italia, España, Canadá, Brasil y Argentina. 

Las presentaciones de las películas y las actividades colaterales de Instar dispondrán de espacios físicos en varias ciudades en seis países. Barcelona, París, Nueva York, Miami, Ciudad de México, Buenos Aires y San Pablo albergarán la muestra. En Cuba, la experiencia del asedio gubernamental en la sede del Instituto de Artivismo «Hannah Arendt» (Instar) en La Habana durante la primera edición del festival en 2019, unido al funcionamiento del evento durante la pandemia de manera remota a través de Internet, ha convencido a los organizadores de la utilización de la plataforma Festhome para visionar la programación online de las películas, tanto de la muestra especial como de las obras que aparecen en concurso.

El cineasta José Luis Aparicio, que repite curaduría del festival en 2023, defiende la expansión del evento a partir de la expansión de una diáspora de realizadores que crece sin parar como consecuencia del accidente en que se ha convertido la vida de los cubanos: «¿No es acaso la nación una entidad más compleja que aquella que desmarcan los límites geográficos, los extremos políticos? ¿De qué manera repensar la estructura del festival para que refleje, e incluso potencie, la actual circunstancia de la gran mayoría de los cineastas que acompaña?».

Más allá de la lista de obras en concurso —que se analizan en este texto con más detenimiento—, no se debe perder la oportunidad de disfrutar de las presentaciones especiales del festival. La selección incluye películas de cineastas jóvenes como Miguel Coyula, Ricardo Figueredo, Rafael Ramírez, Alejandro Alonso y Marcel Beltrán ―estos dos últimos también con películas en concurso― junto a realizadores consagrados como Fernando y Miñuca Villaverde.

EN EL PRINCIPIO FUE LA CENSURA
Para comprender de una manera coherente los orígenes del festival habría que remontarse a 2018. En ese año, la feliz coincidencia de la muestra A Cuban Cinema Under Censureship —curada por el crítico Dean Luis Reyes— y la performance de la artista Tania Bruguera —Sin título (La Habana 2000)— en el MoMa de Nueva York terminó generando una serie de ideas que desembocarían en la aparición de la sección de cine dentro del Instituto de Artivismo «Hannah Arendt».

El objetivo de la sección era reubicar y dar visibilidad a cierto tipo de cineastas y películas que en Cuba no tenían opciones más allá de la producción independiente. Sin embargo, el proyecto de un festival de cine no se concretaría hasta un año después. Le precedería la creación del premio PM —un fondo de ayuda para óperas primas— y el premio Nicolás Guillén Landrián para obras en cualquier estado de producción. Después llegaría la Muestra de Cine Independiente-Pendiente, con curaduría de la escritora y actriz Lynn Cruz, antesala de lo que sería el Festival de Cine Instar en 2019.

La edición siguiente, curada por el cineasta José Luis Aparicio —que en lo adelante se encargaría de organizar el festival—, va a cubrir 2020 y 2021. El evento, con una cobertura virtual debido a las restricciones de la pandemia de la COVID-19, estaría marcado por la desaparición en Cuba de la Muestra Joven, consecuencia del recrudecimiento de la censura y la represión del régimen contra cualquier tipo de manifestación artística considerada contestataria.

En 2022, la muestra Land Without Images formó parte de Documenta 15 en Kassel, Alemania; un archivo que logró reunir más de 150 películas en un esfuerzo sin precedentes por recuperar parte de la historia audiovisual cubana, ocultada y secuestrada por la visión oficialista de la Revolución.

UNA LISTA OFICIAL CONTRA EL OFICIALISMO
Con el festival, Tania Bruguera y el resto de los organizadores persiguen extender la compleja y singular pauta fundacional del Instituto de Artivismo «Hannah Arendt» a la hora de aglutinar obras que se desarrollen en esa zona intermedia que existe entre la creación artística y el activismo. La fortaleza del tratamiento de la realidad podría explicar la preponderancia de los documentales sobre las obras de ficción en la lista oficial del evento.

Hay luego otro tipo de división que responde al diálogo que se establece con el espectador. No puede, o al menos no debe, enfrentarse asumiendo iguales variables de análisis ante películas como La opción cero de Marcel Beltrán (construida a partir de videos tomados con la cámara de varios móviles, en la que se sublima el rigor de la crudeza de una realidad que no quiere ser creativa, no quiere ambages, no los necesita), con películas como Mafifa de Daniela Muñoz (que, a pesar de estar filmada con un estilo aparentemente descuidado, el espectador termina por aceptar la narrativa de proximidad como un discurso que no está exento de belleza).

En La opción cero, Marcel logra transmitir el desasosiego de sus personajes porque de alguna forma todos sentimos que podríamos reproducir cada uno de sus estados de ánimo. Sabemos cómo de posible llega a ser la desesperación por dejar atrás el legado de las doctrinas, la falta de libertad, la impotencia, el hambre, el rencor, el cansancio y la tristeza vital que nos inoculó el dogma corrupto e insensible que significa la Revolución.

La travesía de La opción cero es el impulso último de un tipo de cubano que no pudo resolver de una manera más fácil el modo de largarse. Un tipo de cubano que quizá se sorprenda a sí mismo por su fortaleza y por su capacidad para mantenerse unido en los momentos más difíciles. Móvil en mano, grabando y haciendo directas en las redes sociales como única arma para seguir adelante.

El filme de Marcel es de las películas en las que, si hay alguna duda respecto a cómo concibe el cine su director, lo más aconsejable es revisar su filmografía. La opción cero no es un documental para hablar estrictamente de cine.

Sin abandonar el tema de la visión del inmigrante, nos encontramos con Un homme sous son influence. Se trata de un emigrante que está en otra condición, ha llegado, sufre por otras cosas. En la ficción de Enmanuel Martín hay una latencia tragicómica que es muy cómica. Por momentos quisieras ser un magnate y hacerle un mecenazgo para que produzca la película con más calma. No sé si para quitar los jump cuts que a lo mejor no son jump cuts o porque notas que el talento se disipa exclusivamente por un tema de velocidad en el rodaje.

El chucho que impone el punto de vista del director sobre el negacionismo, los gurús financieros, las estructuras piramidales, el trumpismo o el activismo desbordado de sus novias Nicole —que a pesar de su energía militante no tienen ni idea de lo qué pasa en Cuba—. A él le gustaría que para ellas Cuba fuera importante y le duele que no sea así. Sin embargo, cuando tiene que defenderse de su falta de compromiso se justifica argumentando que en Cuba había política a todas horas y en todas partes y por esa razón él no quiere saber nada de política.

Esta indolencia con la política te hace pensar que la pequeña patria de Enmanuel se parece a la de su amigo Carlos Melián cuando estaban en Santiago de Cuba. Preocupados por un cine menos social, con una proyección estética cuyas fuentes no tienen nada que ver con Cuba, más allá de la recuperación de Santiago como expresión de una conciencia territorial. La misma conciencia territorial que quizá Enmanuel haya trasladado a las ciudades canadienses que lo han acogido y con las que se siente en deuda por no poder estrenar en ellas su película.

En Llamadas desde Moscú de Luis A. Yero —última víctima de la censura al ser eliminada de la programación del Nuevo Festival de Cine Latinoamericano—, asistimos a una zona de desarraigo que no ha llegado a la de Enmanuel Martín en Un homme sous son influence. La performance de soledad de Yero establece una Cuba que funciona en la memoria de sus personajes como un amor tóxico al que sabes que no puedes volver. El vínculo que queda se explica todo el tiempo a través del móvil, con llamadas, con mensajes, con Tik Tok. Siempre encerrados, sea en la habitación, en el ascensor o en el metro. Los planos rodados en exterior funcionan como cortinillas para ordenar las tramas que se cruzan sin llegar a tocarse. El filme está envuelto en un ambiente que mezcla un tono de decadencia queer con la ciudad de Moscú como telón de fondo de un exagerado escenario distópico, acentuado por la banda sonora y las preocupaciones estereotipadas de la guerra.

Cuando uno de los personajes está hablando ―aclaro que por teléfono― con una amiga y le asegura que su etapa de estudiante fue la mejor época de sus vidas. No estamos en presencia ni de un lugar común ni de una reflexión de inmadurez. Es simplemente la constatación de una generación castrada, sin presente ni futuro.

Como ocurre con los primerísimos primeros planos de Mafifa o con la áspera sobriedad del segundo acto de Taxibol, terminamos claudicando positivamente con el tono narrativo de los diálogos monologuizados de los personajes, quienes teléfono en mano transmiten una melancolía que sabemos que no nació en Rusia. Tristeza de inmigrante que mira las noticias de su país en Meta, vaya o no vaya a volver.

En Los puros, Carla Valdés hace un delicado y escueto documental sobre la amistad de una generación que vivió los primeros años de adoctrinamiento de la Revolución con lastimosa inocencia. Sus padres y sus amigos quedan en una casa en la playa para celebrar el reencuentro. Cargados de recuerdos y reflexiones sobre cómo afrontaron —lo que bien hace en llamar uno de los personajes— el futuro.

Visitar la URSS y observar cómo el sistema se va quebrando lentamente les genera una decepción devastadora. El modelo no funciona, no sirve de nada tener fe en que algo cambie y, lo peor, es el mismo modelo de Cuba —no sirve de nada tener fe en que algo cambie—.

En Taxibol, Tommaso Santambrogio contrapone dos planos narrativos tan sólidos como diferentes. En el primero, con marcado carácter documental, rueda la conversación entre el cineasta filipino Lav Díaz y el taxista Gustavo Fleita en el interior de su taxi mientras recorren las calles de San Antonio de los Baños. El diálogo en dos idiomas, así como cierta atmósfera de amistosa condescendencia, va creando un extrañamiento dentro de la secuencia que se completa con la confesión violenta de Lav respecto a Juan Mijares, militar responsable de varios crímenes durante la dictadura de Ferdinando Marcos en Filipinas.

El segundo plano narrativo es un ejercicio de sobriedad cinematográfica en el que el actor Mario Limonta se echa sobre los hombros el tono de lo que resta de película. La representación tambaleante pero imponente del viejo asesino radicado en Cuba pone en relieve la práctica no poco numerosa de exmilitares de dictaduras, terroristas, antiguos nazis y demás calaña histórica afincados en países del tercer mundo para escapar de la justicia.

El baile de símbolos por el que arrastra los pies Juan Mijares a veces puede parecer simple, sobre todo, el que tiene que ver con las pesadillas que lo asaltan noche tras noche por la culpa o el terror de que lo ajusticien. Más logrados son los momentos en los que, a pesar de su edad, funge de matarife para sacrificar un cerdo —acercándonos al militar sanguinario que disfruta con la muerte— o la escena en la que utiliza el telescopio para mantener vigilados a sus hombres como si fuera un capataz que ronda a sus esclavos o un latifundista que no les quita ojo a sus ciervos o un comandante en jefe que no deja vivir a su pueblo.

Con Taxibol, Santambrogio logra que las imágenes adquieran el peso suficiente para quedarse en la memoria. En una de sus diatribas dentro del taxi, Lav Díaz manda al carajo el cine que se hace bajo la etiqueta del arte por el arte, declaración de intenciones que podría ponerle los pelos de punta al espectador o lanzarlo de cabeza a las barricadas. Lo bueno y, sobre todo, lo gratificante es que después del speech el segundo plano narrativo no renuncia a lo cinematográfico y logra un poso de ecuanimidad que le viene muy bien al final de la película.

El cortometraje Agwe, dirigido por Samuel Suffren, es la abanderada de las obras que conforman la lista oficial de películas que no son cubanas y una de las gratas sorpresas del festival. El pulso del filme abandona todo tipo de intelectualización a la hora de afrontar la necesidad de sus personajes. Aquí no hay discursos de género, inclusión o racismo estructural. Aquí hay pobreza. Los personajes se mueven en un límite que define la existencia como una manera cruda de subsistencia. La aldea de pescadores en la que viven anclados los protagonistas reconfigura el significado del mar como algo que va más allá de la fuente que les provee de vida. El mar es un tesoro porque es el mejor amigo de las fronteras —como reza la voz que se escucha en la primera escena de la película—, sus olas llevan esperanza.

Samuel Suffren logra condensar el tempo de la narración para que los 17 minutos de metraje alcancen para unificar los tres actos, para que la película respire e incluso sea emocionante. La puesta en escena añade un controlado movimiento dentro del plano, poniendo en valor un tipo de dirección que no deberíamos echar tanto en falta. El rigor parece ortodoxo, pero es correctísimo y el espectador agradece la fluidez de la narración. Luego está el compendio que ofrece la belleza de un tipo de cultura específica dentro de un paraje conmovedor y una historia desgarradora.

En El rodeo, de Carlos Melián, por momentos la recreación de las atmósferas parece serlo todo. Al leer la sinopsis se piensa que se entiende un poco más, pero en realidad el espectador se queda con la sensación de que necesitaría la sinopsis de la sinopsis. Lo bueno es que las pequeñas unidades de significación, al igual que en Abisal, parecen estrofas. Buenas estrofas. Bien escritas. Los diálogos son lo suficientemente sorprendentes como para sostener las pequeñas unidades de significación.

Lo malo es que al unirlo todo regresamos a la ambigüedad. En su Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, Borges decía que la ambigüedad siempre es una riqueza. Aquí puede que lo sea porque es una película que te va sorprendiendo con las ocurrencias del director. Como la conversación de un amigo muy inteligente que te divierte con sus digresiones. Incluso lo que para cualquiera podría ser un símbolo quizá para él no lo sea. Ni la isla ni las jaulas ni el pueblo inundado ni la muerte. Todo es exactamente lo que es porque su visión se enrola mejor en un discurso del divertimento. Por eso El rodeo a veces parece un ejercicio. Que alguien le produzca un largo a Carlos Melián para que saque afuera todo lo que tiene que decir.

Con Abisal, de Alejandro Alonso, se completan las películas en concurso que podríamos llamar de autor. Si bien es cierto que las secuencias parecen también estrofas —como en el caso de Melián—, el discurso de Alejandro es más descarnado, más directo, menos territorial. La dirección de las escenas y el trabajo con los actores transmite un estado de comodidad difícil de explicar. Igual sucede con la fotografía. Si tuvieras un hijo que fuera una lata de celuloide se la dejarías con total confianza a Alejandro porque la convertiría con toda seguridad en una película hermosa.

Abyssal, junto a Mafifa y la recién censurada Calls from Moscow, son tres de las películas que fueron o han sido programadas por el Icaic. Abyssal, incluso, obtuvo el Coral a mejor corto documental en 2022 en el Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano. El affaire con la oficialidad no terminó bien porque el mensaje que envió el director desde Madrid para ser difundido en la ceremonia de premiación fue censurado.

El tema de la censura, de leitmotiv a factor común de la historia amarga de la Revolución, catalizando obras que no tienen la más mínima oportunidad de distribuirse —como el periplo selvático de supervivencia de Marcel Beltrán, Veritas de Eliecer Jiménez o Women dreaming a nation de Fernando Fraguela—. Lo anterior no quiere decir que el resto de las películas vayan a ser distribuidas por el Icaic. Aquí va censurado toʼ el mundo, Instar no es un Festival de películas censuradas, pero casi.

Women dreaming a nation le ocurre algo parecido a Option Zero respecto a la urgencia de la producción. Las salidas para documentar el encierro en la casa del artista Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara junto a otros miembros del Movimiento San Isidro (MSI) se limitan prácticamente a los archivos grabados por los teléfonos móviles de los acuartelados y las directas que fueron subiendo a las redes hasta viralizarse —como ocurrió después con el puño en alto del rapero Maykel Osorbo atado a una esposa policial—. 

La batalla generada en los medios de comunicación oficiales cubanos versus la contundencia «contrahistórica» de lo que el mundo pudo observar en las redes fue determinante —en igual sentido, cómo olvidar el episodio de la versión ralentizada emitida por el Noticiero Nacional de Televisión sobre el golpe que lanzó Alpidio Alonso Grau, ministro de Cultura, para hacerle creer a la población que solamente intentaba estrechar la mano en señal de saludo—.

El uso de las redes antes y durante el acuartelamiento en San Isidro no solo fue decisivo como forma de extender la verdad, también funcionó como chispa para sacudir el posicionamiento de personas cuyas conciencias permanecían tan adoctrinadas que eran absolutamente apolíticas. Es el caso de Daniela Rojo, una de las voces que cohesionan el discurso de la película junto a Katherine Bisquet y a Anamely Ramos. En la película, Daniela admite despertar del letargo después de acceder a la información que se estaba vertiendo a raíz del Movimiento San Isidro, la consiguiente protesta ante el Mincult, la formación del grupo 27N, el estallido social del 11J y la marcha frustrada del 15N.

Women dreaming a nation es un documental imprescindible sobre uno de los momentos más importantes de la historia reciente de Cuba. El núcleo de la película, sin embargo, transmite una autosuficiencia que no pareciera necesitar más punto de vista que el que define el acontecimiento histórico en sí. Sobre ese eje, pivota y se instala en la memoria sin la necesidad de un punto de vista que parece estar esperando una película que no es esta. Quizá el conflicto esté solo en el título. El enfoque del relato desde la óptica de Daniela, de Katherine y de Anamely por momentos se diluye ante la fortaleza social y audiovisual que arrojó el MSI, un fenómeno sin distinción de sexos, razas y credos que no se merece la excepcionalidad de ser soñado por ningún colectivo más allá del conjunto de todos los cubanos. 

In Roads of Lava, la directora Gretel Marín articula un discurso que no cesa. Es absolutamente respetable porque no solo reivindica, sino que desmiente falacias oficialistas como la ausencia de racismo en Cuba, así como las dificultades añadidas que sufren los colectivos racializados para abrirse paso en una sociedad que sigue sin sacudirse la lacra de los prejuicios. Asume también la representación de otro tipo de minorías como las personas homosexuales, ataca el patriarcado y defiende, quizá tangencialmente, el valor de protegerse ante la apropiación cultural. La cuestión es que el discurso sobrepasa los valores de la película por cuanto es película, porque depende más del valor del mensaje que está intentando transmitir que de otro tipo de sensibilidad. 

In Mafifa, por otro ladopuede que se esté en presencia de una visión demasiado personal como para concebirla desde una dimensión sociológica. Sin embargo, la intención reivindicativa de Daniela Muñoz Barroso sobre la figura de Gladys termina tejiendo alrededor de la campanera una exaltación feminista, sin manejar otro discurso que la admiración sobre una mujer cuya memoria merece ser rescatada porque llegó a convertirse en leyenda dentro de los congueros de Santiago de Cuba, terreno de reconocido carácter patriarcal. El mensaje de esa reivindicación se transmite desde la autenticidad de las emociones que es capaz de transmitir el lenguaje del cine y no desde el efecto que pueda perpetrar la voz de un personaje que actúa como narrador de los problemas que le aquejan o pueden aquejarle como ocurre con los protagonistas de Roads of Lava.

Lo inquietante y no menos curioso del proceso —que al final también podría entenderse como aculturación— es que el posicionamiento que se reconoce en Roads of Lava es una herencia de las democracias occidentales, específicamente de las izquierdas progresistas en su búsqueda de un nuevo perfil de votante ante la crisis de la clase obrera como grupo social reconocible. En Cuba, al no haber una democracia y, por ende, una izquierda que necesite empoderarse, se termina sesgando aún más una sociedad que necesita estar unida sobre todas las cosas. Lo anterior sin contar que son prácticas de bandos políticos que por lo general ¡apoyan a la Revolución cubana! y que, por lo tanto, no reconocen la dictadura por ser una dictadura de izquierdas. 

En el corto de animación Hojas de K, Gloria Carrión utiliza los dibujos personales de K para construir un retrato de la violencia de la dictadura en Nicaragua vista a través de la mirada de una adolescente. El abuso policial y el desparpajo de un Gobierno corrupto que ahonda en la herida de un país que se desangra va marcando el pulso de una historia que nos devuelve a una niña que no volverá a ser la misma después de la tortura y la cárcel. 

Las otras dos películas extranjeras incluidas en la selección oficial del festival son And How Miserable is the Home of Evil del iraní Saleh Kashefi y Windows del venezolano Jhon Ciavaldini. El corto de Kashefi hace una arriesgada recreación de los últimos momentos de la caída del líder supremo Ali Khamenei, con una puesta en escena que recuerda más el espacio de un acto performativo que el de una película en sí. 

Con Windows, Ciavaldini sumerge al espectador en un relato de desarraigo y violencia en la Venezuela de 2017, que es al mismo tiempo la Venezuela de Chávez y Maduro. Construido a partir de la comunicación con su madre desde el exilio en Buenos Aires y de videos tomados desde la distancia endeble de una ventana, el espectador asume la posición de un testigo que observa aterrado el horror de la represión bolivariana.

COMPOTAS PARA EL POSTRE
La inclusión del documental Veritas de Eliecer Jiménez en la selección oficial del festival ha acabado de agitar el avispero. La he dejado para el final porque de alguna forma simboliza el sentido más primario del Instituto de Artivismo «Hannah Arendt», el valor de sus miembros, sus colaboradores y fundadores.

Se trata de esas películas que te recuerdan la profundidad en la que una doctrina puede mantener enterrada tu mente. Mientras más profundo, más oscuro. Por eso muchas personas se sorprenden cuando descubren que en ese documental sobre Playa Girón el punto de vista es el de los cubanos de carne, hueso y alma que conocimos como «los mercenarios». Hombrecitos disfrazados de camuflaje. Torpes, cobardes y fáciles de apresar. Caminando en fila, cabizbajos como si hubieran nacido para la derrota.

Cuando Eliécer Jiménez concibió la película sabía que tocaba uno de los temas más delicados de la historia de la Revolución. También debió intuir que tenía entre manos un tema de gran interés. Más allá de la luz que se pueda arrojar a partir de los testimonios de los veteranos entrevistados, la película funciona incluso sin proyectarse. Fue lo que sucedió en las horas previas a la inauguración del IV Festival de Cine Instar, por el revuelo que está causando entre la cúpula del Estado cubano, como evidencian los respectivos tuits del ministro de Cultura Alpidio Alonso y de Abel Prieto.

«¿En nombre de qué libertad, a no ser la de destruir la Revolución, puede pedirse que nos entendamos con quienes hacen parte de esta nueva operación pagada por la CIA contra el proyecto colectivo del pueblo cubano? ¿Qué patriota podría llamar nuestro al cine contrarrevolucionario?», escribió Alonso Grau. 

«Otra operación a gran escala vs. la cultura revolucionaria: el Festival de Cine Instar. Una vez más pretenden dinamitar la institucionalidad cultural con el empleo de “líderes” pagados por nuestros enemigos. Nos subestiman nuevamente», escribió Prieto.

Viendo las reacciones, la verdad es que no sé por qué el Gobierno no acaba de explotar el negocio de fiscalizar con algún impuesto la lista interminable de asalariados que tiene en nómina la CIA dentro y fuera del país.

Veritas, un reposado pero emocional relato de algunos de los miembros de la Brigada 2506, desgrana el proceso de la preparación, el entrenamiento y la llegada a las costas cubanas, así como la decisiva influencia de J. F. Kennedy en el fracaso de la operación. 

El testimonio de los veteranos de Bahía de Cochinos se va reconstruyendo en el espectador con la amargura del que se siente traicionado. Una amargura que se acrecienta por la vulnerabilidad del que actúa por sentimientos que pueden confundirse con la inocencia. Por eso duele cuando esos hombres reconocen que han sido abandonados a su suerte. Saben que no van a ganar y se enfrentan a un destino totalmente incierto. 

En aquel momento nos enseñaron que fueron cambiados por compotas. 

Si nos atenemos a la historia, tanto para ellos como para nosotros, la elipsis no solo ha sido más cruel, también está siendo mucho más larga.

You can read the original note here

Toda la luz que haga falta Read More »

Carla Valdés León: "I think all the characters and stories have an undercurrent of tragedy".

By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - december 6th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Los puros' (2021); Carla Valdés León (IMAGE YouTube / Philadelphia Latino Film Festival).

Carla Valdés León competes in the fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival with her film 'The Pure Ones' (2021), available to Cuban audiences from Monday, December 4 through December 10, through the online platform Festhome. It will also be screened from Tuesday through Thursday at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, as well as on Thursday 7 at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris, and next Sunday 10 at the General San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.

These presentations as part of the film event organized by INSTAR are the reason for this interview. A podcast via WhatsApp, as defined by the filmmaker herself, allowed us to talk about her parents, the archive, cinema as a collective art, and always about Cuba and her memories.

The family archive has become an indispensable tool for filmmaking worldwide. How much did that archive contribute and/or hinder you in this film?

 There is something that I am very passionate about family archives: it is the record of you that you didn't make. In other words, these first images where I appear, where my parents appear, give meaning to the film because that's where I come from and my family history, and of course, those are my "pure ones", my parents. And it's a story that didn't begin with this film. I've been listening to these songs at family gatherings since my childhood. I know enough about the USSR to understand that I wasn't born there. So that is like a treasure that one finds, especially when you want to start telling your story. That is, to narrate from the intimate, the family, and the personal.

The archive is a treasure that you find, and if you go searching -depending on the moment and the product you are working on- you will find clues there, encrypted messages, that suddenly will work very well with what you are thinking because, of course, you are the same person, the same river: that's where I come from. And it allows me - and I imagine many filmmakers as well- to look at the record we didn't make from a place where we can understand it differently and create something with it.

But I would like to make it clear that the film archive came much later. The process was a little different from other things I've done. 'Days of December' and the film I finished [recently] are films that I have thought about [previously] -and we have thought about, because in the other one, I worked with Lisandra López Fabé and the team from the very conception. I've always had an idea of what film I'm going to make, and then I shoot it, or I'm shooting it, but I've been creating ideas [before]. In this case, 'The Pure Ones' is an extraordinary thing, because I knew that my parents were going to meet in this house with those friends, that Gilberto, a friend they hadn't seen for thirty years, was coming from Germany. I said: "Well, I'll take my camera, I'll take a tripod, I'll take all the equipment I have and, while I'm at it, I'll take the old photos of my parents, and we'll see what happens.

Carla Valdés León, Cuban filmmaker (PHOTO Courtesy of Carla Valdés León)

Who knows what will come out.” I looked for a slide projector. It was a loan from a lady I think from Azerbaijan or something like that, who had gone to live in Cuba during the Soviet Union: she had married a Cuban man and had been working and living in Cuba all her life; she was selling her Russian slide projector and lent it to me when I told her the story: "I'll lend it to you", she said, "and then you bring it back to me". But it was a bit like that: that is, camera, photo, projector; my parents were going to be there, I was going to be there... And I said: "Why not?"

I had always wanted, and I still do, to make my parents' film. To make it out of that story that is like a fairy tale, the romantic story of a Russian film, like a Genesis story. For me, my parents' film is all that: their love story, their friends, the USSR, Russian, the songs, the books; a faraway place, a completely imagined place. I think it was because of that intuition that I took the camera and started filming. I filmed all those days. At first, I was experimenting: I like this shot because the house is nice, we're going to film the tablecloth, and we're going to film them having breakfast and the sea and all that. The thing is that what happens in the film starts to unfold: the reunion. And I'm adding more and more, and I realize that, with what I'm filming, I can begin to tell the story of my parents. The film of my parents. During that week, which is how long the shoot lasted, I would sit down at the end of the day and write down what I was filming, what I felt was happening, or maybe this happened here, or I'd like them to do this tomorrow... And so it started to turn from a more intuitive thing into an "Okay, this is where my parents will sit now" shoot. And by the time it got to slide time, I knew I was shooting for something.

That's also why I chose the slide plan because I just wanted to shoot the images. I wasn't going to film them talking, laughing, or anything like that, just the projected image and put them in front of it. Those were later choices. So, of course, the film is my record of a moment that was very much marked by emotion, intuition, and the desire to tell that story, which later in editing becomes ‘The Pure Ones’.

Still (detail) from 'Los puros' (2019); Carla Valdés (IMAGE Facebook / Ciervo Encantado).

It was a bit like that, that's why I tell you that the archive came later, in the editing process. We started to assemble the images I had filmed and then, much later, digitalizing the VHS that my grandmother left me and with which I started another process related to the family archive, these things appeared, and we said: "Well, let's use this because it tells me why I am filming my parents in this way, in this place". I think that, in those early archival images, there is a mix. There are early VHS images from the nineties, which are the ones my uncles filmed. When my relatives came from the United States, they filmed this kind of thing with a camera they brought with them. But the final trip, in which we arrive at that house, that record in the archive becomes a record that I do film, but at a much younger age. I was fifteen years old when I got my first video camera. So, the mixture of all those images is what has led me to record these other images now. That is the purpose of that first archive.

As for the slides, I have always been passionate about the photos of my parents, and the young people who are portrayed in those photos; they seem to be from another time and another place because they are in another time and another place, of course, but for me there is a distance between those young people and my parents. And it has to do with that love story, that innocence, with the hope of a better future and beauty. Since I was a child, I looked at these photos all the time. My father used to put them on a projector in the house. So I had them very present, and it seemed beautiful to see them thirty, forty years later. I think the images can tell a story by themselves, and that's a little bit of what we tried to do with the slide montage: a little story of them within that other story, the reunion.

As a filmmaker, you are very interested in working with the archive. If you had to give a justification or an explanation for this, what would it be?

I'm passionate about archives, I don't know, it's a power and a weakness. I've worked with institutional archives: ICAIC archives, Cuban television archives, newspaper archives, the National Library, in short... I have a passion for archives. I really like the building and the space of the archive, the organization, and the dynamics of archival preservation. I think it's beautiful to film it but also painful. The space of the archive has a very intense attraction.

On the other hand, the family archive also appeals to me a lot because of what I was telling you before. You find in it keys to understanding why you make the films you want to make. It works that way for me, I don't know. Right now, I'm in the process of writing the project I'm developing and reviewing some family archive material -which doesn't have much to do with the project-, I found a small scene where I'm filming my parents: suddenly, I understand why I do it. I mean, how in the complete innocence and naivety of being fifteen years old, and with a camera in your hand for the first time, you start filming your parents and, when you see yourself now doing it with more awareness, you understand why you started to, in a certain way. You understand from where you started looking at them, and that is very important. Sometimes, I find those answers in the family archive. It helps me a lot in my work, it helps me a lot to think about things, and I think it has to do, in this case too, with the part of the family archive, the place, and the legitimacy from which I want to speak. I want to talk about certain issues that are a bit complex -or that you feel do not belong to your generation, that it is not your history because you did not live it-, and through the archive, through the family history, you can immerse into it, because we all have a personal history and, from it, I can start talking, for example, about the USSR.

I'm not only interested in telling the story of my family, three fighters from Angola, or my grandparents. That's not exactly what interests me. I am interested in how, from those emotions or family stories, I can understand why we behave the way we behave as Cubans or as Cuban families now. Because I have so many contradictions when it comes to understanding certain things, or not understanding them, or when approaching certain subjects... In general, both Days of December and The Pure Ones, as well as the film I am making now, try to talk a bit about Cuba and be part of a search to understand who I - and my generation - can be within the political and social map of the Cuba we live and will live in, which is full of mined territories and places we don't know how to enter. That interests me a lot and the archive allows me to do it.

It has its nuances. Sometimes, the institutional archive has the image already processed, edited, and an established narrative but if you can leave that little path that has been built for you and start to see only the images or listen only to the audios, you will start finding other clues. And that's what the archive is for me: it's a place where I can find clues to understand.

I am excited about projects like “Lxs archivistas salvajes”. On the other hand, I think it's important that the new president of ICAIC, Alexis Triana, talks about the need to rescue the archive. I’m also afraid of effervescent enthusiasm. It takes a long time to invest and organize an archive. It also requires respect for the people who work there and have done so with limited labor guarantees or security and without the necessary supplies or technologies… And sometimes, what rushing things do is violate those processes a bit. I am very afraid of that. It gives me the shivers because enough has already been lost. Too much has been lost from the physical archives in Cuba, and I really don't want more to be lost. On top of that, there is always concern about the censorship of the archive.

Poster of the film 'Los puros' (2023); Carla Valdés León (IMAGEN festivaldecineinstar.com)

Because we talk about the censorship of finished films, which may or may not be shown at festivals... But with the archive, there is a censorship process that involves whether or not to make available what they want or don't want to be seen by the public. And it also happens that what they don't [want to be seen], tends to go to waste, to rot in an archive, and then it is thrown away. And sometimes censorship is not even ideological. It can be: “We are not interested in discarding this film”. Well, in the discarding of that film, there is a record, a moment, or a process that is and could be very relevant to the film landscape of the country. For the history of the country.

Was the representation and/or recreation of the story by your parents and their group of friends something you worked out with them in the process of preparing the film, or did you let it come out "naturally" in the filming?

The representation of my parents' story came out quite spontaneously, naturally, and intuitively for them and me. The crew of this film consisted of me with a camera and my partner at the time, who did the sound. I mean, very poor sound and camera. The best of what we shot is in the short film, and then in post-production, especially in sound, Glenda [Martínez Cabrera], the sound designer, did wonders so that the film could be heard in the best possible way. But obviously, it was a very homemade shoot, very homevideo, very intuitive at the time, and very much a pact with them.

What has always made me happy, calm, and proud of the work we all did in that film is that there was an unspoken pact from the beginning. In fact, there is the image at the beginning of the film, in which Gilberto turns to me and says: "But they are filming me..." In other words, filming them was never a problem. The camera was there, and they knew I was filming all the time, and there was no fear at all; on the contrary, I felt that they gave themselves to the image. Film me, record this moment, which is important to us. There was a sense of, "This is important to us and worth recording, worth leaving our story for the future." And that's beautiful. That pact with my parents and with my parents' friends is beautiful. Even after the film was finished, some of them saw it at the cinema, others at home, and sometimes the comments were: "We didn't imagine you were going to do something like this". A little bit is always like "I'm looking at myself”, but at the same time, it's like: "It's good that it was made; it's good that this story of us was made". And I find that very nice. I am very happy with that process.

Still from 'Los puros'; Carla Valdés

The Pure Ones’ is the first time you have worked with a documentary screenwriter, Lisandra López Fabé. What led you to make this decision? Besides the obvious role of a screenwriter, what did López Fabé bring to the film?

I started working with Lisandra [Liso] when I was editing 'The Pure Ones', but in the process of 'The Belly Button Line', which is already finished. I had started working with Liso as a screenwriter for 'The Belly Button Line', and I told her about 'The Pure Ones’, and she joined a process where there was already an editing cut. I was working with Lilmara Cruz Pavón, whom I also include in this answer because I think this trio -Lilmara, Lisandra, and myself- is very important in the final cut of 'The Pure Ones’.

More than having the scriptwriter, it was having Lisandra as a person. I started talking to her, and we began to share ways of seeing cinema, of seeing stories, of approaching and telling them. With Lisandra, it was spectacular, not only because she is incredibly talented and knows how to weave a story from start to finish: she has craft, but also because she has an incredible sensibility. And what is most important to me: together we have created a strong sisterhood and we see ourselves in each other. She knows how to understand why I did it this way or not, what went wrong or not, and she knows how to help me find the story better. In that sense, it was from that sisterhood that we started to finish editing.

And then, Lilmara... I didn't have a script for 'The Pure Ones'; I filmed it, as I told you, without any previous writing. I started working with Lilmara -with whom I also have a very close friendship and sisterhood, and we understand each other very well-. There were many scenes and I gave her the material and told her: "Tell me what do you find here? What do you see at this moment?". Lilmara also edited a lot on her own because she knows the material and my parents and understands perfectly what is at the core of my motivations. In the same way that Lisandra understood it later. And, of course, when you work with those two people who can love your parents in the same way, love them, care for them; [able] to find the emotion of the film and to understand me: why I was making a film about my parents at that moment and [why] I was filming in that way, it's ideal.

This is our film. Then Glenda, in sound post-production, contributed a lot to the narrative. I had a beautiful team. Also, Claudia Ruiz, who did the color correction and with whom I have a very close relationship. Working with a team I felt I had a bond with was fundamental. I couldn't work any other way; I've tried other things, and they didn't work out.

I don't think there are screenwriters for documentary films and screenwriters for fiction. Yes, Lisandra has done a lot of documentary screenwriting, but she can also write a fiction screenplay, a short story, or a novel. What she has, more than knowing how to write for films is that she knows how to understand them; when she becomes involved, she does it fully, and lets you share everything with her: what worries you, what scares you, what you didn't like, or what you did like, what you liked and you don't know why you liked it... She becomes a friend, a sister, and a companion.

Liso also helped us find the final structure of the film. We had many moments in the previous cut that we rearranged so that the structure of the film would be more directed toward the final emotion of my mother singing. This is a finding that was, to a great extent, thanks to Lisandra because she knows how to find that fiber in films.

Part of the staff of 'Los puros', by Carla Valdés. Award ceremony at the 42nd International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, Havana (Image Instagram / Carla Valdés León).

Would you consider ‘The Pure Ones’ a contribution to the collective construction of a Cuban memory? Why?

I don't know. I wish it was. I was watching some things recently, thinking a bit about the Cuban filmic memory. Especially because I see very little record of the present. Other times, they filmed "professionally" a lot, all the time, what was happening; now very little is filmed. And that had me thinking a lot.

A few months ago, Jose [Jose Luis Aparicio] and I curated an exhibition of recent and not-so-recent Cuban cinema at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, with films by Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Sara Gómez. And I was thinking about the more contemporary cinema, closer to us, and how it is the emotional record of a generation. It is not going to be the documentary record of what happens in the street and everyday life, as it could have been the case of the ICAIC Latin American News, for example, but it is the emotional record. I think it also has something to do with the genres that are being worked on in cinema, that is, science fiction... Well, humor always... I was thinking a lot about that: the emotional record of a time and a generation.

All these characters and stories have tragedy undertones: they are stories and characters that have been betrayed, mocked, or [have] become disenchanted with their story, with no possibility of redemption. They have been left out of their story and always try to get back on that train, but it's impossible. That's a tragedy thing, but it's in comedy, in science fiction, in the most classic documentary -like 'The Pure Ones' might be-, or in something more experimental. I feel this background in the most recent Cuban cinema, and that's why I was telling you that Cuban film memory is more emotional than a documentary record in situ, direct, of the moment, of the day. I hope that a film like 'The Pure Ones' can be part of that in the future and that someone can read it that way. Not to seek in 'The Pure Ones' what my parents' generation was like in their fifties, but to understand a little of their fears and their role as the generation that was promised the world and more.

Sometimes it hurts me a little to say that about our parents, but it is true: that generation, which studied in the Soviet Union, was educated in the hope of a collective project that promised much more than it fulfilled. It delivered things, but it did not deliver everything, and above all, it left these people stranded at some point, without explanation, when they were starting their careers and their lives, and they had to get back on their feet. They had to put themselves together again amid that destruction, by themselves and alone, without the company of the great protective State, without the company of the great social project. On the contrary, [they did it] by problematizing every day, and now much more deeply, that social project that is no longer what they wished it to be.

But I don't want to see them alone in this sadness. It's not only that they had to rebuild themselves, but that they did it somehow. And my question is how they did it, to do it myself, or to do it differently. There is courage also in our parents' generation; maybe not the courage many would have wished for, but I feel that they have been very courageous, and we have to learn a little from them, too. And understand them in order to judge them better. I always do it from love; I cannot do it any other way.

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Women dreaming a nation

By Mariana Martínez Bonilla – december 7th, 2023

LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE

'Women Dreaming of a Nation' (2022), the most recent documentary by Cuban filmmaker Fernando Fraguela, is presented as part of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, founded and directed by Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera. This year, the main focus of its curatorship is on the transnational character of contemporary Cuban cinema. In the screenings, which will take place at various international venues from December 4 to 10, the festival presents a series of feature and short films (both Cuban and foreign) that address the tensions involved in living in countries with totalitarian regimes.
 
This film by Fraguela, winner of the Best Documentary Award at the Malaga Film Festival for 'The Abattoir' (2021), narrates the events that took place in Cuba following the civil uprisings organized by the San Isidro Movement (MSI) in response to the enforcement of Decree 349, which regulates artistic and cultural activities in the country. Said decree was implemented after a group of Cuban artists, cultural managers, and theorists independently organized the 00 Havana Biennial in May 2018. In the face of such an initiative, the Cuban government decided to censor and repress the activities of the Biennial, but also all those developed by various cultural agents considered as opposition to the regime.
 
The consequences of the decree's implementation, on the other hand, were met with the participation of MSI members in various protests and complaints in the form of performances, film festivals (Celuloide Quemao), the writing and signing of manifestos, and poetry festivals, among many other activities. The Cuban state's response to the Movement's initiatives has constantly violated the human rights of its members, depriving them of their freedom and subjecting them to various forms of harassment and repression.
 
One of the most paradigmatic examples of this was the arrest of rapper Denis Solis on November 9, 2020, exactly one month after the Movement's headquarters in Havana was raided for alleged contempt of authority after releasing a video on social media in which an alleged police officer entered his house without a warrant. Following this arrest, MSI members organized a series of protests, considered acts of peaceful civic resistance. They were seeking a dialogue with the authorities of the Cuban Ministry of Culture. After allowing 20 representatives of the Movement to express their concerns and demands, the government implemented various campaigns of repression that were documented by the protesters.
'Women Dreaming of a Nation' recovers the testimonies of three women who participated in the events that led to the MSI strike (the creation of the 27N movement, the social outbreak of 11J, and the civic march of 15N), which included the hunger strike of some of its members and started as a result of the protests against the arbitrary sentence imposed on Denis Solis. However, the underlying issues were the constant threats and repression, along with the economic changes imposed by the Cuban government.
 
Thus, Daniela Rojo, mother, artist, and self-taught poet; Katherine Bisquet, writer and poet; and Anamely Ramos, university professor of art theory and history, star in this documentary. They narrate the implications and urgencies of the civil movement of organized resistance in which they participated and after which they were sentenced to exile, either because they could not return to Cuba by explicit orders of the Cuban state in complicity with other international agents or as in the case of Daniela Rojo, self-exiled in Germany as a political refugee
 
In the 27N manifesto, under the subtitle "The country we dream of", the artists, intellectuals, and journalists who drafted it express their desires to inhabit a country where violence, repression, and censorship are eliminated in favor of a prosperous and equitable democracy. 'Women Dreaming of a Nation' explores these desires by subverting the sexism of the official state narrative and making Daniela, Katherine, and Anamely its protagonists, not only by giving them a central place in the frame but also by positioning them as the subjects who critically enunciate the urgency of thinking about the historical contradictions of the regime and their current consequences: from the repression against Denis Solis and Luis Manuel Otero to the impossibility of reuniting with their families, or accessing unbiased information about current events on the island.
 
The testimonies of each of these women serenely explain, from their very particular points of view, the abundance of images coming from various Facebook live streams made during the protests and acts of resistance by the MSI, but also by other cultural and civilian agents, which the director collected. The contrast between the clarity of the words that each of the protagonists of the documentary chooses to give an account of what happened after November 26, 2020, and the blurred images of disruption and brutality makes clear the desolation of a state of affairs in which, in the face of the collective reading of a poem (an event that took place on January 27, 2021), the authorities responded violently.
 
The shaky, out-of-focus, and vertical images that seek to record the various moments of violence and repression remind us of those audiovisual records of the Arab Spring (2010-2012), the first revolution to be recorded with smartphones. The rapid spread of the uprisings through the Internet and the hyper-connectivity of the mobilizations managed to exceed and break any authoritarian attempt to control the flow of information. For the first time, the world could witness the social uprisings in real-time, but also the violence with which the authorities tried to control them.
 
In the Cuban case, the live transmissions by citizens who shared the anti-regime ideals of the MSI and by members of the Movement who were able to record the violent raid from inside the headquarters became one of the main ways in which citizens produced counter-narratives, as shown in the testimonies of Daniela, Katherine, and Anamely.
 
Those impoverished images, as German artist and essayist Hito Steyerl would call them, are documents that show the effervescence and convulsion of the moment that was recorded and transmitted through the smartphones of its participants, for which, as the intertitle that begins the film explains, the access to the Internet in the island during 2019 was of utmost importance. Without them, as well as VPNs to access independent news sources critical of the regime, it would have been impossible to bypass the censorship and repression that sought to silence the Movement and its protests.

Fraguela does not discard the drama of the events in 'Women Dreaming of a Nation'. On the contrary, his work takes position and offers a panoramic view of the genealogy of the events and the disagreements with a political regime that attempted to crush any attempt at uprising with all its repressive machinery. Without renouncing the expressive powers of the audiovisual medium in favor of narration, this powerfully ethical and reflective documentary, which joins a long list of reactionary works that confront totalitarianism in Cuba such as the works of Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara himself, the poems of Bisquet, and the political art of Tania Bruguera, seeks to make intelligible the events that have taken place in recent years in Cuba, as part of a broader and deeper context in which women have taken the stage to lead the fight for a democratic and free state.

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Veritas

By Mariana Martínez Bonilla – december 3rd, 2023

LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE

Veritas (2021), the documentary directed by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, will once again reach international screens through the IV INSTAR Festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, which will be held from December 4 to 10 in different venues, both on-site and virtual, in Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Cuba, and France.
 
At the time, the film was part of the official selection of some festivals, including the art fair Documenta 15 (Germany). Within the framework of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, the 67-minute film responds to the proposal of the Institute of Artivism for the revision of the transnational character of Cuban cinema in dialogue with other cinematographies with a critical view of the context of authoritarian repression.
 
In Veritas, the story of the Bay of Pigs invasion during the Cold War is told through the testimonies of some of its protagonists from the invading side. Thus, sixty years later, and from exile, the men who survived the attempt to overthrow the very early state of affairs established with the revolution face a series of questions about the loneliness, humiliation, and abandonment to which they were subjected by the United States after being at the center of the political complexity of what is also known as the Battle of the Bay of Pigs.
 
Through the use of archival footage and interviews with veterans of the 2506th assault brigade who, despite having been trained and equipped by the U.S. government, were defeated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), this audiovisual document is an attempt to tell the story from a place of enunciation that seeks to shed light on the events that were silenced and/or distorted both by Cuban official propaganda and by the U.S. government, which betrayed the ideals of the exiles who enlisted for the battle.
Neither mercenaries nor traitors, as they were labeled at the time, the combatants of the Battle of Giron occupy a paradoxical place in Cuban history. And this is shown in the different testimonies gathered by the director. The narratives of these men, despite being marked by the particular contradictions of those who abandoned their homeland to fight for it and ended up back in exile after being looked down upon and denigrated by their compatriots, are not characterized by the lapidary adjectivation of the actions of the political powers behind the struggle.
 
Without the mediation of a narrator who tries to establish logical connections between one testimony and the other, who offers hard data on the invasion, or who takes a position on the facts related in the testimonies, the various interviews are strung together to narrate a panoramic account of the groups' arrivals on the island through the rugged territory of the Girón beach.
 
None of these voices refers to what happened according to categories or concepts coined by hegemonic rhetoric. They strive for a sincere and clear enunciation of both the places and the events: the different sides of the conflict are narrated from the singular point of view of the survivors, each of whom describes punctually and clearly all their actions and functions in the battle, from their arrival in Guatemala to the betrayal by then President John F. Kennedy.
In addition, there is a large number of archival sequences that do not propose a relationship that puts those testimonies in tension through some operation of critical distancing or that allows the images to return our gaze by showing us their reverse sides or what was left out of focus, in the background or the abyss of their margins. On the contrary, these images are established as a way of illustrating what the voices narrate: from the accidental landing in the bay to the bloody confrontation with Cuban troops.
 
At times, it seems like the men interviewed are describing what the images show. Thus, the meaning of this relationship is presented as univocal and denies the possibility of a reading capable of problematizing the oral narration of the multiple narrators who appear on the screen in a fixed medium shot location, looking towards whoever is positioned next to the camera and showing themselves in all their vulnerability. Their emotions are made explicit not only through the tone of their voices, that rage or crack, but also through their facial expressions and tear-filled eyes.
 
On the other hand, Veritas also includes some color images, contemporary shots of Havana, as well as of the Bay of Pigs and other regions, which seem to be there with no other intention than showing the territorial characteristics where the men landed or to show the current conditions of the country that the group of men remembers with nostalgia.
At a formal level, Veritas does not present itself as a risky proposal and this is, perhaps, its great mistake. It seems that the director has chosen to offer a documentary that gives preference to the need to show the witness by broadcasting, as clearly as possible, the story through which this specific fragment of history that concerns their personal memory is incarnated and put on screen and that, in relation to the stories of other individuals, ends up configuring a collective memorial structure around a particular event.
 
In contrast, the exploration of the powers of the medium with which it works is relegated to the epilogue that closes the documentary. Announced through a montage that links an aerial shot of the ocean space between Cuba and the United States with archival images of how the members of the assault brigade were received in the U.S. after their liberation, this final part presents some of the veterans engaged in everyday activities (swimming, playing golf and dominoes, etc.), while their voices tell us what they miss most about their life on the island: the summers, the smell of the land, their families. Afterward, each of these men offers a final reflection on their participation in San Blas and the implications of the search and struggle for a free country on both a personal and collective level.
 
Perhaps one could speak of this audiovisual work as the beginning of a crusade to express those other points of view on the stories narrated (or silenced, as the case might be) through the hegemonic rhetoric of post-revolutionary Cuba. Thus, the value of Veritas as a document is not found in its form but in its content since the director and his production team, through the arduous task of gathering and synthesizing the testimonies of the exiles, set an important precedent for the revision of Cuban history and its contradictions and, above all, it offers itself a sharp counternarrative of the Cuban history and its contradictions to think critically about the operations of meaning mobilized in works such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Santiago Álvarez's Death to the Invader (1961), a short documentary film, part of the Latin American ICAIC Newsreel, which narrates from the Cuban-revolutionary point of view the invasion of Bay of Pigs, glorifying the performance of the FAR in the face of the "pro-Batista Yankee" invasion.

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Taxibol

By Mariana Martínez Bonilla – december 3rd, 2023

LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE

In its fourth edition, the INSTAR Film Festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (hence the acronym that gives name to the international film event), founded and directed by Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera, explores the transnational character of recent Cuban cinema and the dialogue it establishes with other cinematographies produced in authoritarian contexts, privileging those works whose aesthetic and thematic proposals are presented as novel and risky.
 
With venues in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Cuba, Miami, New York, Sao Paulo, and Paris, the IV INSTAR Festival will be held from December 4 to 10 in a hybrid format. Included in its official program is 'Taxibol' (2023), the most recent work by Italian filmmaker Tommaso Santambrogio, filmed in Cuba with the collaboration of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, whose international premiere took place a few months ago at the Nyon International Film Festival, Visions du Réel in Switzerland.
 
Santambrogio was awarded at the 80th Venice Film Festival with the Bisato d'Oro prize for best director for his debut feature, 'Oceans Are the Real Continents' (2023), an extended version of the short film of the same name released in 2019, filmed in San Antonio de los Baños, and starring an entirely Cuban cast. In it, advised by Lav Diaz himself, the Milan-born filmmaker portrayed, through beautiful black-and-white photography, the paradoxes of life in the region near Havana, whose inhabitants struggle between loneliness and migration against the backdrop of a rainy, decadent Cuba in crisis.
 
In 'Taxibol' Santambrogio opens a series of questions in a postcolonial tone about the relationship between memory, the forms of obliteration and persistence of the dictatorial past in the Philippines and Cuba, and cinema as a critical device capable of going beyond itself to fight injustice, revealing the power relations that hide behind the traumatic imprints and the ambiguities of colonial discourses in their modern and contemporary forms.
 
In the form of a triptych in which fiction and non-fiction are knotted together to become a critical interpellation, 'Taxibol' is divided into three parts. The first one, a bilingual dialogue that takes place in a closed universe (i.e., a car), witnesses the encounter between Lav Diaz and Gustavo Flecha, the cab driver in charge of transporting him during the Filipino's stay at the San Antonio de los Baños International Film and TV School, and with whom, as Diaz himself states, he shares a universe of emotions and affections that go beyond the barriers imposed by language; for example problems related to migration and interpersonal relationships, and cinema's capacity as a weapon of political protest.
In the second part, after Lav Diaz reveals the true intentions of his stay on the island to Gustavo, the tone of the film changes. A black screen, with some wear marks on its surface and what appears to be a sprocket, starts a silent fictional portrait of the life of Juan Mijares Cruz (played by Mario Limonta) on a farm on the island. This man, as Diaz tells the cab driver, is an elderly former general of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who subjugated the Filipino people for over twenty years, who lives incognito on the island, and whom the filmmaker seeks out to assassinate as part of a ritual of revenge and memorial restitution of justice for his people.
 
Finally, the closing sequence of the medium-length film in question brings us back to a non-fictional tone. This time, with the help of archival footage that shows both Marcos' rise to power and the protests against him, fiction and documentary meet to collapse with a commentary of critical pretensions (Cuban radio recordings off-key as the final credits roll) about the dictatorial parallels between Cuba and the Philippines.
 
On a formal level, once again, the use of black and white stands as a motif that produces estrangement in contrast to the colorful and festive imagery with which life in the island territory is usually associated. The only moment in which color invades the screen is in the final sequence, when Juan Mijares, seated in front of his television set, watches the images of the Philippine archive. Their irruption on the screen, beyond becoming a closing punctuation, allows us to think about the complex relationships between the historical narrative that allowed the consolidation of the dictatorship as a form of colonialism that emerges as a paradox of modernity and how the protest against this form of domination is articulated, on the one hand, and, on the other, the negotiation of the spaces of its persistence.
Thus, the ghosts of the past manifest themselves in everyday spaces of the house inhabited by the former general and his servants. The old man, whose reduced mobility serves as a pretext to make the woman in charge of the household chores undress him and tuck him in for the night, passes through a series of solitary rooms where time seems to be suspended. This perpetual, mummified present is embodied in a series of slow movements, repetitive actions, and static atmospheres: each scene presents slight variations, but in all of them, the man looks out the window or performs some solitary activity such as writing a letter or watching television, smoking a cigar, eating dinner, and going to bed. During the night, nightmares that we never see but hear (screams and moans of pain) haunt him and make him wake up agitated and abruptly.
 
The medium and general shots, beyond their contrasting chiaroscuros (once again, we may wonder about the metaphoric potential of the staging of 'Taxibol'), frame that asphyxiating dictatorial environment, maintained and petrified by that solitary and mute figure. They also show a series of objects belonging to a timeless past since their state of preservation is excellent, almost museum-like, and frame the constant (and also reiterative) presence of a pair of caged birds and numerous hunting trophies: preserved animal heads. Some critics have considered the presence of taxidermy in the film as a metaphor (rarefied, one should add) for the emptying and suspension of life during periods of extreme state violence. It should also be noted that the sequences that make up the fictional part of 'Taxibol' were filmed at the La Vigía Estate, the residence of the American writer Ernest Hemingway between 1939 and 1960, after which it became the Cuban Museum.
As part of these contrasts, extra-diegetic sounds anticipate the encounter with a series of outdoor spaces where banana harvesting and the raising of pigs and chickens take place. All this under the gaze of a foreman who reproduces the colonial latifundist logics, according to which the spaces and the representation powers of the past are negotiated, but also the logics of its manifestation in the form of disciplining and subjugating the bodies of the farm workers who communicate and obey through gestures and, in the best of cases, a grunt of disapproval, as in the case of the domestic worker and cook, after preparing a stew that turned out not to the liking of her employer.
 
Through the situation opened by the conversation between Lav Diaz and Gustavo Flecha in the first part of the film, it does not seem idle to wonder about the symbolic nature of these muted subjects and spaces as a critique on the reproduction of colonial logics, obliterated through the configuration of silences and opacities in the official narratives of post-revolutionary Cuba and the contemporary Philippines. This is not insignificant, as the film was produced just one year after the rise to power of Bonbong Marcos, the dictator's son, following a campaign that sought to erase the crimes and plunder his mother and father committed during the dictatorship, leaving the Philippines in a highly vulnerable and precarious state.
 
On the other hand, the discordance between the exterior and the interior of the farm also appears as a continuation of the formal duality of the film, which employs fictional strategies to elaborate a documentary narrative and some documentary observational forms (general and static shots) that end up forming the core of a fictional mise-en-scène. Thus, in the first segment of Santambrogio's piece, Diaz and Flecha are shown through an interplay of close-ups and counter-shots that relate to the rhythm of their conversation. These men inhabit the space of containment, empathy, and friendly familiarity offered by the automobile in which they have traveled from San Antonio de los Baños to Havana, as Diaz states in a fragment of the improvised dialogue that the director himself, in an interview with Antonio Enrique Gonzales for Rialta, referred to as a canovaccio. That is, a form of theatrical improvisation.
In short, the triptych that shapes 'Taxibol' displays the relevance of the dictatorial memory in an audacious way, where audiovisual resources are knotted with a critical reading, developed from the interstitial convulsion of the present, which appropriates the paradoxes and performative excesses of the dictatorial violence and its consequences. Firstly, through the insistence on the filmmaker's position on the social, cultural, and political commitment of cinema, made explicit through the voice of Lav Diaz, and secondly, through the search for a visual, sonorous, and narrative approach that questions how the "recent past" (a term Elizabeth Jelin refers to as a euphemism to confront the difficulty of naming the extremely violent and terrorist forms of state control taken by Latin American dictatorial regimes) has been written as a univocal entity, unidirectional and monumental, giving account of the paradoxical condition of the phenomena, the policies and the violence that keep it under a perpetually immobile validity, as if it were a mummy, like that ghostly figure that Diaz has the task of murdering bloodily, crushing its head and devouring its brain.
 
The critical roots of ‘Taxibol' beyond its affiliation to the work of the Filipino filmmaker, with which it has both thematic and formal affinities, and its hybrid execution, a motif that has already been seen as a form of narrative transgression in Latin American cinema in the last two or three years and which, if not interpreted with caution, could prove problematic, respond to the urgency to account for the colonial past and the obstinate and unpunished persistence of its violent grammars, not only in Latin America and Latin America and the Caribbean but throughout the global South. With this film, T. Santambrogio joins the group of the most interesting voices in contemporary cinema, determined to take a stand and reformulate the memories of repression as in the case of Paz Encina, Andrés Wood, and Pablo Larraín, among others, whose filmographies emerge within the framework of a broader set of theoretical and artistic searches that delve into the memories of dictatorship in Latin America since the 1980s.

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For whom does the bell of 'Mafifa' toll?

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS -November 20th, 2023

RIALTA

Scene from 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Courtesy of the IV INSTAR Film Festival).

As she confesses at the beginning of her second feature film, 'Mafifa' (2021), Daniela Muñoz Barroso suffers from a "progressive bilateral hearing loss" that prevents her from perceiving the high-pitched sounds of the world, just like those emanating from the "bells" in the traditional congas of the city of Santiago de Cuba, whose piercing sounds tame and channel the drums, their low rumbles, into unspecified but continuous paths. For in the conga only movement matters, the forward motion. It is a perpetuum mobile of sound and fury that travels towards itself in the most absolute and uroboric self-sufficiency.

Gladys Esther Linares, better known as Mafifa, is considered by devotees of the Santiago conga as the "major bell ringer”: an object of worship, reverence, and myth since her sudden death in 1980, just on the verge of that year's carnivals, long before the filmmaker herself was born.

It belongs to a time before Daniela's time. It is a presence in fugue toward the past that leaves a trace still perceptible but in inevitable disintegration, just like the few blurred and brittle photos that some witnesses extract from old albums and precarious personal archives. The pupils that saw her alive are faded and tarnished. The newspapers that refer something of her life and death break at the slightest touch.

The material drifts and sinks into the waters of oblivion. The sounds created by 'Mafifa' on the congas were never recorded, and their echoes are fading in the memories of those who once heard them. Perhaps, more than metallic clinks, they remember the impression it left on them. Sound turned into feeling, an operation of pure emotional alchemy. 'Mafifa' is also a sensation, a state of being that makes the eyes of the interviewees shine before Muñoz Barroso's camera and a force that his most faithful disciple invoked when he felt himself weakening in the middle of a conga. It is a powerful and invigorating cry. A dense absence. An element integrated into the air breathed by all those who live for and by the conga.

Poster for 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Courtesy of the IV INSTAR Film Festival).

Mafifa is always a sharp chime away from Daniela, who always strives to overcome this biologically impossible border in order to discover and understand the woman of flesh and blood who reigned over a place almost exclusively for men. An unrepeatable priestess who left scattered traces of random coherence in a world no longer able to listen to her.

The film's portrait of the bell ringer is as complex as fragmentary, dislocated, and truncated. It blends and completes with the one that, simultaneously, Daniela Muñoz Barroso weaves of herself as an equally fragmentary subject, in struggle with the perceptive deficiencies that condition her dialogue with the world and challenge her to reimagine the silenced through a confessional gaze, which in turn incites a photography of close-ups, detailed shots, narrow framing, and unstable fixity. The young filmmaker departs significantly from her previous documentary, 'The Parrandas' (2017), in which, to investigate another of Cuba's most deeply rooted festive traditions, the Parrandas of Remedios -in the center of the archipelago-, she opted for a much more functional, expository photography, which veiled and protected the intimate vulnerabilities that become essential in 'Mafifa'.

As she suspects that the entire world is even more elusive for her, Muñoz Barroso clings to details, expands and enlarges them in each frame, concentrating on reading them as possible omens, symbols that enclose universal truths, condensed maps of the past and the future, quick channels to access the Universe. From lip-reader -to guess the words that wade through her auditory field-, she becomes a decipherer of faces, gestural calligraphy, and bodily signs. Her sight is trained in decoding subtleties.

The faces, the bodies, and the spaces, always captured in very close frames, invite us to look as Daniela Muñoz Barroso looks, to understand her gaze and her idea of the world, and at the same time, they invite us to explore the lightest and most secret plots of reality, to train our sensibility, to transcend surfaces, to suppress our physical senses to give way to extrasensory perception, to the third eye.

When she is presented with the first portrait of the legendary bell-ringer, Muñoz Barroso casts her lens on the fuzzy black and white photograph -probably a copy of a copy or an enlargement of a copy of a small photo-, perhaps with the instinctive impulse to read her lips, to perceive the silent call that Mafifa seems about to make from the past. We then witness an almost mystical moment where the whole discourse of the film is sublimated.

Mafifa is also one of these channels of mysterious nature and inapprehensible symbolic richness through which the film seeks to access a third area much more closely related to 'The Parrandas': the anthropological inquiry into the Santiago conga and its paroxysmal, cathartic, tragic strata, its effects on those individuals who, according to certain traditionalist perspectives, whether complacent or contemptuous, tend to dilute into a depersonalized mass, into the amorphous revelry with a hive-like attitude, into a collective and univocal subject.

In her (healthily) stubborn struggle against general shots, which for her end up representing a lack of communication and unintelligibility, Daniela Muñoz Barroso dedicates herself to breaking down a conga into particular faces, looking into the eyes, reading facial maps, and revealing possible secrets. Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1963's 'In an Old Neighborhood'; 1965's 'The Dance'), and his thoughtful deconstructions/cartographies of the most humble Cuban groups, gravitates over her as another tutelary spirit, apart from Mafifa. The strident female face in which the title shot of 'Memories of Underdevelopment' (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) is frozen, seems about to appear at any moment. And where is Mafifa? Where is Daniela?

Scene from 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Courtesy of the IV INSTAR Film Festival).

As part of the IV INSTAR Film Festival program, ‘Mafifa’ will be available for Cuban audiences on Tuesday, December 5, and Sunday, December 10, at 7:00 p.m., on the online platform Festhome. The film will also be screened on Friday, December 8, at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona, Spain, while on Saturday, December 9, it is scheduled to be screened at the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

You can read the original note here

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Special screening of the Cuban film 'Blue Heart' in Paris

By Paulo A. Paranagua – november 5th, 2023

RIALTA

Actress Lynn Cruz in 'Blue Heart' (2021); Miguel Coyula (FRAME Courtesy of the director)

Blue Heart (2021), an independent production shot in Cuba, is the most inventive and original Cuban film since the great classics of the 1960s.

Director Miguel Coyula, 46, engages in a dialogue with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). He builds a bridge between the intellectuals of the romantic stage of the Castro Revolution and the young generation of protest artists, who have adopted as their anthem the song "Patria y Vida" (Homeland and Life), taken up in the popular demonstrations #11J. Prominent figures of the intermediate generation, such as filmmaker Fernando Pérez and, later on, the musicians of the punk/rock band Porno para Ricardo, are also part of the cast of Blue Heart.

Miguel Coyula is a magnificent creator of forms, combining avant-garde experimentation with a love of popular genres. Blue Heart is part science fiction, part thriller, and also borrows from animation. This hybridity produces constant surprises and new sensations. Humor tempers the tragedy of situations where hallucination springs from the everyday. The logic of collage dominates the insertion of newsreel or documentary excerpts.

However, each image is processed and transformed in the computer, a tool as valuable as the camera for the author: camera-brush and screen canvas for a brilliant visual artist. The invention of the mise-en-scène and the dazzling work on the image immerse us in a vision of Havana out of the ordinary. The protagonists are possessed, and driven by superior forces.

The message is decidedly modern and iconoclastic, as Blue Heart attacks the mythology of the "new man" heralded by the Cuban Revolution. Coyula imagines the regime resorting to genetic manipulation to achieve this goal, with results as disappointing as Fidel Castro's experiments with dairy cows or agriculture. However, Coyula's argument is universal: science now promises the happiness of humanity and the salvation of the planet, even if it sometimes involves taking intrusive initiatives, both in bodies and mentalities.

In my opinion, Blue Heart is one of the most exciting revelations of 21st century cinema.

You can read the original note here

Proyección especial de la película cubana Read More »

José Luis Aparicio

Interview with José Luis Aparicio, curator of the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival.

By David Obarrio – December 3rd, 2023

PERRO BLANCO

From December 5 to 10, under the coordination of filmmaker Ricardo Figueredo, CADAL (Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America) presents at the Manuel Antín Hall of the San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires the IV Film Festival of the Hannah Arendt Institute, directed by renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Admission is free, and vacancies are limited to the hall’s capacity. 

Aparicio had two extraordinary films in different editions of BAFICI, the feature 'Dreams Adrift'(2021) and the medium-length film 'Tundra' (2021), which operate as X-rays of a particular malaise spread like a dire mantle over the island of Cuba: the one that affects people who are not submissive to a dictatorial regime when it has adopted a tree-like dynamic. A thousand forms of microscopic control with which fascism directs, inspects, supervises, and inhabits the minds of those under its rule. A more or less encouraging news is that dictatorships also fail. Under the shadow of these loopholes, an eternal desire for autonomy creeps in. Free films are made; the ingenuity, the courage, the careful resilience of those who venture into minefields without hesitation can make the difference. Emigrated or exiled directors like Aparicio gain the unspeakable advantage of an ecosystem of freedom that, however, does not guarantee everything. In the honesty and the lucidity of filmmakers like him lies the expectation of a cinema free of camouflaged complicities or compromises, a cinema capable of holding the tyrants' gaze without renouncing imagination and true artistic independence. Cinema can be free when its identity is not regulated by the acquiescence to a global rhetorical inventory. As long as there is life in images, there will be hope.

Aparicio, who is currently living in Spain, explains the details of his curatorship and the situation of a cinema under the weight of threats and restrictions of all kinds.     

DO: What were the general criteria you used to put this exhibition together?

JLA: Since the first edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, the main point of the event has been promoting and exhibiting Cuban independent cinema produced inside and outside the island. The culmination was last year's great retrospective at Documenta Fifteen in Kassel, Germany, where more than 160 audiovisuals from the last seven decades were screened. We consider this exhibition, "Land Without Images," our third festival. The fourth edition presents a competitive section for the first time, with fifteen films aspiring to the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award. Eleven of these movies relate to Cuba, but we decided to also include filmmakers from countries whose socio-political and artistic production circumstances are close to ours. Excellent short films from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, and Iran make up our selection, as well as the medium-length film ‘Taxibol', shot in Cuba by Italian filmmaker Tommaso Santambrogio, with a narrative that explores the dictatorial history of the Philippines. We will also present films by Cuban filmmakers who are shooting in the diaspora, where they address the migratory crisis that the island has been going through for years. Our guiding concept is the transnational character of the new Cuban cinema and its growing dialogue with various cinematographies of the global south, especially those of countries where authoritarian governments impose censorship, repression, and exile on their artists. From a curatorial standpoint, we focused on works premiered since the beginning of this decade that explore some of the most critical conflicts of their immediate realities, many of them with a significant trajectory in international festivals. We look for authors committed to their society and their time but equally interested in exploring the limits of the cinematographic language. From very heterogeneous points of view, the films in our selection are risky and powerful civic and expressive exercises. The cinema we privilege is that which understands its political stance as inseparable from its work with form. On the other hand, if we can speak of a recurring theme in this year's program, it would be migration. The vast majority of the selected filmmakers live outside their countries, many are not even allowed to return.

DO: Has Cuban cinema become “transnational" in order to exist? It happens with a good part of the world's cinema, but it seems to me that the Cuban case has very specific needs for it to be that way.

JLA: In order to exist and, I would add, to be free. For the last thirty years or so, Cuban cinema has been made thanks to co-productions, especially with Europe. I am also referring to official cinema, to a good part of its comedies and melodramas. In the case of independent cinema, the scarcity of funds to promote it within Cuba and the insufficiency of those that exist to cover most of its production condition us to seek international support. On the other hand, if it wants to escape the repressive apparatus, the independent cinema on the island should not seek government funding. In the last two years, several films supported by the Development Fund, launched by the Official Film Institute (ICAIC) in 2020, have been censored at the Havana Film Festival and other cultural venues. One of them, the documentary ‘Fito's Havana’ (2023, directed by Juan Pin Vilar), was even shown on national television without the permission of its authors, violating their rights and slandering their work. Added to this context is the migration of a large part of the Cuban filmmaking community, a fractal phenomenon of the severe migratory crisis the country has been going through in its recent history. These creators continue to produce their films in different parts of the diaspora, films that remain linked to Cuba, add complexity to its cultural landscape, and enrich it with dissimilar visions. It is inevitable that these filmmakers also begin to reflect on their new spaces and develop connections with other creators and cinematographies. I believe that what might initially seem like a conflict or limitation, the condition of being emigrants or exiles for many Cuban filmmakers today, could also be seen as an opportunity, a creative and productive challenge that helps Cuban cinema expand in new directions and acquire a more liberated and universal character. The transnational could be the key to a necessary transformation. There are films like 'In a Whisper' (2019, directed by Heidi Hassan & Patricia Pérez), 'Option Zero' (2020, directed by Marcel Beltrán), and 'Calls from Moscow' (2023, directed by Luis Alejandro Yero) as examples of these new directions and vanishing points. I cannot fail to mention that the island's cultural leadership recently censored Yero's documentary. Cultural policy stumbles again, but Cuban cinema is perhaps more alive than ever.

I understand then that there are intermediate zones. Does that "zone" of impossible dreams, halfway commitments, and the official and the unofficial exist?

JLA: I suppose so. The censorship apparatus is tenacious and "effective", but it is not enough to censor all independent cinema; it focuses mainly on those films where discomfort is more noticeable. Several works financed by this official fund, which is also quite recent and grants amounts that pale compared to the acute inflation, have been exhibited at official festivals. The government's tolerance zone for artistic gestures that question its status quo and the most critical conflicts of that society is becoming increasingly narrow. If the last few years have shown anything, as far as Cuban culture is concerned, it is the immense fracture that has occurred between artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. Right now, there are artists imprisoned for their works and political ideas. Right now, there are exiled artists. As much as they try to give the impression that nothing is happening, it is a false tranquility that is very difficult to sell. I think the current state of events speaks of an irreconcilable difference. Fortunately, artists, wherever they are, are finding more and more ways to produce and exhibit their work, getting rid of any dependence on official institutions.

Do dissident filmmakers film how they live: in half-light, as a shadow, as a conspirator, with nonconformity as a motto?

JLA: What you describe could apply to most independent Cuban filmmakers, regardless of their different degrees of dissidence. Let's remember that any alternative expression in a totalitarian context invariably becomes a political gesture. The alternative film movement, which has developed mainly in the last twenty years, has endured precarious production conditions and has survived censorship, defamation, and lack of recognition by the government. Now, it also survives exile or emigration, depending on the case. In the island’s context, one cannot think of the "indie" label as a sort of rebellion against the market because that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about a country with a non-existent film industry and a stagnant film institute that prohibits more than it produces. How can it be understood that this same entity wants to talk to us about decolonization? Our cinema, like all independent art in Cuba, should not technically exist: nothing in its context favors it, except for the overall crisis the country is going through and the need to express, reflect, and analyze it. The intelligence, sensitivity, and bravery of filmmakers have left a film corpus that not only exists but is strong, risky, diverse, and dialogues better and better with what is happening in international cinema. Then come the labels, many imposed by the media and official institutions to delegitimize and even criminalize creation. Of all these, the one I prefer is precisely the one you use: "dissident". It should not be a crime to think differently, to dissent, and to discuss the problems of any society. I think cinema has proven to be a powerful tool to scrutinize reality. Now, in these terms, there is always an effort to homogenize us, and Cuban filmmakers do not all think in the same way. Unlike the monolithic discourse and the political verticality of the regime, the filmmakers' collective is plural, quite democratic, and does not think like a hive. This enriches their works, so aesthetically diverse, but linked to a shared spirit: questioning, re-reading, and re-shaping an idea of a country from images and sounds that break away from tradition to expand in unsuspected directions. I believe that the selection of Cuban films in this fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival bears witness to this range of perspectives.

You can read the original note here

Entrevista a José Luis Aparicio Read More »

Cuban filmmaker Marcel Beltrán talks about cosmic music, night houses and the zero at the end of the road

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS - december 4th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Option Zero' (2020); Marcel Beltrán (IMAGE YouTube / AFISilverTheatre).

The feature-length documentary 'Option Zero' (2020) by Marcel Beltrán will open the IV INSTAR Film Festival with a screening at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) on Monday, December 4. The event's journey begins with a film about crossings, transhumance, exodus, and shipwrecks on land.

This film will be screened on Thursday, December 7, at the Maison de l'Amerique in Paris. On December 8, it will be screened at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo and the Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. It will also be screened on Sunday, December 10, the final day of the transnational event, at the General San Martin Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.

'Option Zero' competes for the Festival's awards, but two other films by Beltrán have been included in the Special Presentations program, which seeks to expand the cartographies of contemporary audiovisuals. 'Nighthouse' (2016) and 'The Music of the Spheres' (2018) will be available to Cuban audiences on the Festhome platform, from Monday, December 4 through Sunday, December 10, between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m., and will also be screened on Saturday, December 9, at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo.

The filmmaker's gaze splits in these three films, like a fractal and protean path. His exhibitions at the INSTAR Film Festival result in a brief but cardinal personal anthology that highlights one of the most striking film corpus of recent years in Cuba. I talked with Beltrán about the motivations, processes, keys, and resonances in his films.

Although ‘The Music of the Spheres’ stars your parents, their story, and their love, could it also be considered a sort of indirect audiovisual "self-portrait"?

Yes, indeed. 'The Music of the Spheres' is a self-portrait. It is very clear. In contemporary cinema, self-referentiality has gained a lot of space. During the pandemic, we all thought that, somehow, cinema was going to move towards the reflection of everything we were living, and it wasn't like that. There was a boom of a kind of "third wave of self-referential cinema", which was also very much supported, of course, by the use of the archive. I think it was foreseeable.

'The Music of the Spheres' was a gift that, in a way, I gave myself through my parents, with my parents, but in which my brother Darío Beltrán and I were not going to appear directly on screen, living the experiences and issues raised in the film. That was never the idea, from the beginning, from the very beginning.

That was a project that had to be worked on little by little, slowly, especially with my parents. I remember that the first note was something like embarking on a journey with my parents through those places that marked their relationship as a couple and to which they did not want to return, to which they had not been back for a long time or had never returned.

As she confesses at the beginning of her second feature film, 'Mafifa' (2021), Daniela Muñoz Barroso suffers from a "progressive bilateral hearing loss" that prevents her from perceiving the high-pitched sounds of the world, just like those emanating from the "bells" in the traditional congas of the city of Santiago de Cuba, whose piercing sounds tame and channel the drums, their low rumbles, into unspecified but continuous paths. For in the conga only movement matters, the forward motion. It is a perpetuum mobile of sound and fury that travels towards itself in the most absolute and uroboric self-sufficiency.

Gladys Esther Linares, better known as Mafifa, is considered by devotees of the Santiago conga as the "major bell ringer”: an object of worship, reverence, and myth since her sudden death in 1980, just on the verge of that year's carnivals, long before the filmmaker herself was born.

It belongs to a time before Daniela's time. It is a presence in fugue toward the past that leaves a trace still perceptible but in inevitable disintegration, just like the few blurred and brittle photos that some witnesses extract from old albums and precarious personal archives. The pupils that saw her alive are faded and tarnished. The newspapers that refer something of her life and death break at the slightest touch.

Marcel Beltrán (PHOTO Linkedin / Marcel Beltrán - Mediocielo Films)

I was slowly working with them. They looked at me with faces of "We don't understand the point of this", but I shared with them the good news in terms of financing the film, and they were happy for me. In the end, when I won the DOCTV funding and the film was totally possible, they said, "Well, let’s take the opportunity to see the family, to revisit these places...".

There is a key issue here: I was born in Moa [Holguín province; northeastern Cuba], my brother was born in Moa, and we had never been back there. Imagine this issue of being born in a place within your own country, but of which you have no news and know absolutely nothing. That was a very strong motivation for me: to be in that space and to travel with them, through them. And so it was, fortunately.

So the film went through Moa; then, San Luis, my father's hometown; then, Havana, Santa Clara... I am a witness to what is happening, which crosses their story transversally. Although the film proposes a certain continuity, it is not about that. There are several times at once. You could be inhabiting a present that is actually a kind of past and that no longer refers to them but to me. I never think of avoiding anything, to be honest, but it was clear to me that the film could not be about me; it was not my vision of this or that. That's when the first vicissitudes arose.

When it was time to edit, there was a significant question regarding the point of view in the film. Who was watching, who was a witness to all that, how to explain what happened, who assumes, in a way, the responsibility of telling the story. Of course, it was me. So, that's where the voice-over narration comes in.

It was something that frankly I hadn't considered at any point; from the first drafts of the story, there was never a voice narrating. It's not that the voice came later or that it was an editing solution, that's not the point; it wasn't so simple. Eliseo Altunaga had been following the whole process, even before shooting, and he had already told me this could happen. Because of all the problems the film goes through: racism, the very difficult family situation with my grandfather, who never knew my father... My father is there; my grandfather is no longer there. Who was in charge of all that? Obviously, me, and that's what I did.

In none of my previous projects, I appear as a narrator. It was never a solution. I repeat: I was not trying to avoid a technique that seemed too recurrent in the contemporary panorama, such as self-referential cinema, which has a voice that explains and leads the story. But we were convinced that in this case there was no other solution. There is something that changed the film's landscape a bit: my father's death.

We finished shooting around February and then we edited, we had a cut, and, of course, the film went into another season when my father's illness began to worsen. So, imagine, he made his transition, and there was an important learning experience for me in terms of the relationship with the film. Because the images were the same and, at the same time, they were different. The way I questioned those images had changed. So, the film was edited again. That's when I got involved as an editor: I started to mourn. That's when the need for the voice was confirmed.

Maybe that was the last mark the film needed as a kind of displaced self-portrait: me reflected in others. All those issues are very submerged, very subtle because those are the ones that appear on screen. But I agree with you that, to a certain extent, it's about me. I remember my dad made several comments to me when he saw a cut of the film. He mostly referred to the way the story was being told. It seemed to him that it was not important to touch on issues that I had already overcome in some way, spiritually. So, I did my best to please him. It seemed important to me, but it was also about my wound. And the film was an arrow in the family, and it had to come out.

Poster of 'La música de las esferas'; Marcel Beltrán (IMAGE Courtesy of the interviewee)
Poster of 'Casa de la noche'; Marcel Beltrán (IMAGE Courtesy of the interviewee)
Poster of 'The Zero Option'; Marcel Beltrán (IMAGE Courtesy of interviewee)

The intimate dimension in ‘The Music of the Spheres’ contrasts at times with infinitudes symbolized by the very universe that your father scrutinizes. Did you want the film to establish a relationship between personal history, the "minimal" facts, and the "grand narratives" of history?

There are several levels, of course. We are in the context of intimate life, of the simplest. This small world of the couple is the most important because it is a story of a couple overcoming a family problem. In the end, it is about closing the door and being alone with your partner. That's the dimension of time that interested me, as a son who looks at his parents and has a need to record them as a memory. I'm very happy to have shot this film for that reason.

It brought a lot of headaches, especially in the family, as you can imagine. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion and can think whatever they want or whatever they can. I didn't make the film either to attack or to defend. It was simply a strong need to have this portrait of my parents' relationship history, which I lived from an intimate point of view as a son. And that is the film’s perspective: portraying not the external but the internal. Of course, the internal is a consequence of all these issues that were always totally silenced. So I am always immersed in this game of the relationship between them, the micro with the macro, which is the family. And, of course, that has implications [related to] the shaping of our identity as Cubans and the very circumstances of the country around issues such as racism and stigmatization because of your racial status or whatever.

There is a very delicate, very small game there. I am aware some elements are encrypted only for my parents. Others are for me. There is another story, let's say, that everyone can keep. It has happened a lot that at the exit of the cinema, someone comes up to me, shakes my hand, and says: "Your mom is very brave, your dad is very brave. The same thing happened to me." I knew I was touching a sensitive nerve, and that is ultimately the relevant thing about making a film you want to share with others. But there are minimal coded things that relate to my dad's inner world, which in a way is the counterweight of something so (I wouldn't even know what to call it)... of so little interest to us, on a spiritual level within the family, as the issue that engages the film itself.

I couldn't make a film that somehow touched on the core of their relationship, turning it into the most important point of the story. So I also focused on leaving a trace of the esoteric world they share. I didn't insist too much either; I could have gone a little further.

Still from 'La música de las esferas', 2018, Marcel Beltrán.

Nighthouse’ was shot in 16 mm and marked a formal territory very different from the rest of your filmography. How decisive was the use of this format to build a visual poetics like the one in this film?

'Nighthouse' is a film that was made in a very different process. It doesn't have the will, the story, or the path of the other films, which have been more about having an idea, writing it, filming it, and then editing it. No. 'Nighthouse' started from the end. The first thing I did was the last shot of the Cuban flag. I was in Canada at the experimental film residency that Phil Hoffman organizes at his Film Farm in Mount Forest. Around the residency, there are only fields, cows, and Mennonites. It didn't feel interesting to me. I started looking for an idea.

You always find the flag or something Cuban when you travel. So I decided to make an overlay: to shoot with a roll, rewind it, shoot it again, and start overlaying images. That was the starting point of the film. I filmed the flag, a dog, and a fence, then filmed a fire, inked the film, applied a process called tinting and toning, and applied bleach. I used several techniques to play with what the workshop proposed. I ended up with a material that was not ‘Nighthouse’ at all.

I got a taste for it and accumulated material little by little. I was able to film with a Bolex. I went out in the city and filmed a little more. Hoffmann is closely related to this film, not only because of the Film Farm, but also because, in 2010, he was my experimental film professor at EICTV [International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba)], and then I continued assisting him in subsequent editions of his workshops at the School, so we did them together.

I learned to develop in an artisanal way, to do a lot of things that later I also dedicated myself to teaching, and the film came as an accumulation of material. Casa de la noche is from 2016, exactly the year I was editing La música de las esferas. They are two films related to my dad, because of the process of his illness. I took some distance from ‘The Music of the Spheres’, whose initial title was ‘Father’s Hands’. I left that material there for a while, but I still intended to make a film with my father, who was always full of ideas and concerns: he would sit at the computer and organize some films he wanted to shoot. He was always very restless. He studied painting at the ISA [Higher Institute of Art of Havana] but graduated with a performative work that used sound and other elements. Somehow, experimental and fantasy cinema was something he was very interested in. I had all that material. My father began to lose his voice, and one day, he woke up perfectly well, and we decided to do something. He sat on the couch next to me, we wrote the text, and he read it. We recorded, and from there, we started to put something together with these images. I sat at the computer, edited... And it came out very quickly because all the material was already filmed. From there, we got to that piece, a little bit talking about Havana with this subtle character that goes through these walls with his voice.

I'll tell you that, right now, I'm closer to processes more similar to 'Nighthouse' than to my other films in terms of writing, filming, and editing. Right now, I really want to shoot and work on movies, and somehow, I'm organizing my life to make it happen. 'Option Zero' is related to 'Nighthouse' not because of the medium but because of the character of the film. More films like this will likely come soon. We will see.

Marcel Beltran and Paula Gastaud with other filmmakers at the Locarno Film Festival 2022 (PHOTO Via: www.screendaily.com)

I think ‘Nighthouse’ sublimates a cinematic-essayistic will that can be seen in much of your work, even in fiction such as ‘The Cloud’. Will there be other projects that pay tribute to this more risky audiovisual mode?

I just answered that question with the previous one. Yes, indeed. There is always the difficulty of filming. There's an issue related to the digital aspect - excuse me for getting a bit professorial - but well, it's about the context. The digital era promised that everything would be cheaper, and we already know that's not the case. You shoot in 8K, 16K, and it's very expensive. Blank film for Super 8 workshops is nowhere to be found; it is not available anywhere. It's all been sold. Kodak is now releasing its Super 8 camera on the market, which was shelved for six or seven years. There are German laboratories manufacturing film.

That whole world is back, but the most important thing is not precisely what it costs but the minimum structure you need to get the film, the chemicals... having a place to develop everything. After my dad's transition, I've been trying to shoot with film [celluloid]. Even though I had the freezer full of it, and I had cameras, it wasn't pertinent; I had to force my reality too much. I barely had room for the books and for myself among all the books; imagine making a laboratory there, shooting with film. It was very complicated, very complicated.

So I think it's possible that, at this moment, I can face such projects. I have always tried to look at the digital with a certain analogical perspective, considering the digital camera as something analogical, trying to have a result that is unique in some way, that will never be repeated, that has a mark, a stain, an intention or way of looking, scrutinizing, of intervening, that provokes a certain identity contemporary digital cameras lack.

Working with film gives you this. You are always at the mercy of error, failure, or marks; even if you develop in an artisanal way, the digital traces remain engraved on the film itself. All this is a world that interests me a lot and in which you work practically alone. There are several projects and several ideas that I've been thinking about during these years because ‘Option Zero’ is from 2020. I have not released any other films. It has to do with the birth of my son Santiago, who is now two years old, and a little bit with other circumstances: other films have happened to me. But, at the same time, I have been organizing myself to reactivate that world of working with analog, with the handmade development, both in 16 mm and Super 8, which interests me a lot.

‘Option Zero’ proposes perhaps the first summary or filmic systematization of the archives generated by the thousands of Cubans who emigrate illegally through continental American routes. What "curatorial" processes did you undertake to construct this film? What ethical assumptions did you use to structure a personal thesis that, at the same time, validated the multiplicity of voices involved?

This is a critic's question. There was no curatorial process; I didn't handle it that way. But I'm going to tell you how the process went. I think that will be more useful to you because I haven't thought about it in those terms. I would have to think about it, and I haven't done that.

‘Option Zero’ is the film you find; it's not the film you're looking for. They are two different things. I was at the Panama Film Festival and, suddenly, a friend told me: "Yesterday I was talking about you because near my house there is a group of Cubans; I don't know very well what they are doing, but they are in the courtyard of a church". It really caught my attention. I asked him if he could give me a ride. "Yes, sure, it's very close."

We went and, when we passed the small patio of this place of Caritas, I found there were three hundred tents. It was totally mind-blowing to me. I started to talk to them, to understand what they were doing there, but at no time had I been interested in making a film with that. It's not like I came in and said, "Oh, here's a movie”. Not at all. I was mostly shocked with myself because I knew absolutely nothing about it. Today, it's pretty clear: it's on social media, YouTube, everywhere.

It was not obvious at the time. I had heard that there was a crisis in Costa Rica, but I had not seen it. I had the opportunity at that moment, and my first impulse was to get interested, to understand. There were pregnant women, elderly people, a little bit of everything. What were the circumstances? The Panamanian government had closed the borders only because of the Cubans. The situation had become overcrowded, and those people were there in a kind of limbo, waiting.

Still from 'The Zero Option' (2020); Marcel Beltrán

The festival was over and I went to Cuba. I came back and started to be in touch with them. They use Facebook, a platform I don't use much, but I reopened my account, and they started sending me audio messages. That's where the seed of the film is, in the messages they send me. Voice recordings, text messages, images. "Look, this is me, I went up here, this is how I came down," they described.

There was a moment when they told me: "They are going to move us from this camp to another," it took about seven days. I had to decide to go back to film or just let it go. Obviously, I bought a ticket and went back to Panama. I stayed in the camp with them, as just another migrant, to live there, to pass the hours.

The devices we used were elementary. One thing I realized very quickly was that this wasn't a movie where I saw myself shooting with a crew of ten people, and a very big camera and sound. It was a matter of going with what I had at hand. At that time, it was a tourist camera, a simple Panasonic, but it had a nice sensor and lens. It was my father's, by the way. I also had a simple Zoom recorder. One battery, one card. The battery would run out in about twenty minutes; I had to charge it, live with them for a while, and then go back to filming. They looked at me as if I were just another migrant. They hardly believed I was shooting a film. Even the police looked at me and did nothing because I didn't look like a filmmaker at all.

So, consciously, I tried to get as much footage as possible of what the trip implied for them. These are extremely fragmented images because they are going through a jungle, and the battery doesn't last long enough. So they shoot ten seconds, then fifteen seconds, not much. Then, ten or fifteen seconds of each one and others who shared [images] with me. Sometimes, we didn't know who had filmed certain images.

The very distortion of those phones -which were never iPhones or other high-end models- and the pixelation of the images helped me guarantee the privacy of the people, the issue of their faces, of authorizations. I began to see this as an aesthetic path: to play with the pixelation, the degradation of the image, the porosity, the precariousness of the path itself.

Between the archive, the present, and the recordings, I felt that the film existed. It's like several levels, just as it happens in ‘The Music of the Spheres.’ The film is static; it suggests a non-time, a limbo in which they await to see what happens until the last moment when they are put on a bus and leave. I stay; they leave.

Then the film moves on, and the journey happens only through the archive. It's like a past, something a little illusory. They are traveling, but never in the present. They are traveling only inside their cell phones. There is, of course, the Cuba dimension, which was the other curious thing. You would walk into that place with the three hundred tents and listen to Radio Reloj, people playing dominoes, and everybody talking about "Cuba, Cuba, Cuba." It was very strong to have that awareness of leaving a country and somehow feel that it is still with you. It hasn't left you behind.

I have thought about what George Didi-Huberman wrote about men moving out of necessity or desire, and when they move out of necessity, their heads are still in the past. That [explains] conceptually what this migratory effect was in the film.

Still from 'Option Zero', dir. Marcel Beltrán, 2020.

The other interesting thing had to do with the record itself because migrants have always tried to leave a trace, to mark the walls and write their names. This has been the case since the Phoenician sailors, I imagine. There are records like that in Cuba; the pirates themselves left their names on the walls. In this case, it is the same. The peculiarity here, however, compared to other films on Arab and African migration where smartphones already existed, are the live transmissions. Many times they did not record to keep memories, but they used their phones as a defense mechanism to say: "We are alive", "We are here", "We are going through the jungle right now". I felt those on the other side, following them, protecting them, encouraging them.

This is very delicate because there is nothing behind the hashtag. You are not seeing migrants. Something very strange and impersonal was coming together from something deeply personal, and that, of course, touched me... Then, I decided that the film shouldn't focus on anyone; it shouldn't have a specific protagonist or follow someone during that journey, but something a little more difficult: it should somehow portray a situation. And there I was with my little camera following all this.

Once again the voice appears in some way. They keep referring to me throughout the film. Who is shooting this film? Who is behind the camera? Why does whoever is behind the camera come and go? Again, it was up to me to decide whether I go in or out. Do I commit myself or not? The recordings are for me, my name is on them. The text messages too. That's when I decided that once again my voice was not going to suddenly appear. It was not possible in this case but I could use this silent narrator that is created when structuring the messages they sent to me.

It was like a kintsugi effect, of the golden edge that joins all the pieces of the collage. We always talked about the film, in creative terms, as something broken. I used to say: "You have to make the film, finish it, then break it". The film is those fragments glued together again.

I have been respectful, and I still am, especially in terms of distribution, because all those lives are there, and they are still involved in the difficulties that the film exposes. I have been very careful with the film's journey because I know it compromises lives and destinies.

‘Option Zero’, I believe, also raises and stands on the dichotomy between the ways of conceiving and constructing the contemporary Cuban historical narrative. Could we see this as a discursive constant in your most recent filmography?

There is an awareness of the micro-narrative, which somehow positions itself as relevant in the face of the macro-narrative and social and official discourse. That part interests me as a context, but in order to tell the minor, invisible, less visited story, or simply one that does not contribute to the great discourse of social construction where everyone contributes. No. The door closes. There is intimacy, and something happens there that is often the most important thing to me.

Of course, telling that story offers an alternative way, a bit marginal, that works as a mechanism of evasion of that great discourse. The official Cuban discourse is one of the easiest to refute because it is like another, parallel fiction. But in the case of other fictions, which also become [official] discourses, it works the same way.

I believe that, in intimacy, when the human being is there, with the door closed, things happen... and those things interest me a lot. Of course, to make it noticeable, probably, you always need to have on the other side that great depersonalized epic, in which the individual is not noticed. The answer I would give you is a resounding yes, insofar as your question is above all an affirmation.

You can read the original note here

El cineasta cubano Marcel Beltrán Read More »

‛Agwe': waiting as a destination

By ÁNGEL PÉREZ – December 4th, 2023

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Still from ' Agwe' (2023, Haiti); Samuel Suffren (IMAGE Courtesy of INSTAR Film Festival).

Agwe (Samuel Suffren, 2022) begins and ends at sea. For its protagonists, the sea is both salvation and damnation. Agwe tells a love story, the sacrifice of a couple subjugated by hostile life circumstances. François and Mirlande place the fate of their love and the future of the child she carries in her womb in the possibility of leaving the fishing village where they live, in Haiti, and reaching the United States. François tells a friend as they fish: "I don't know how I'm going to do it, but I have to leave. I can't stay here any longer and watch the situation get worse. The sea is the only way.”

In Haitian vodou, Agwe is the patron saint of fishermen. That is the name François chooses for his son when he is about to leave for the United States in a rather precarious boat loaded with people. Mirlande watches it sail away in the hope of seeing her companion soon; with the illusion that, in a short time, the three of them (them and their son) will be reunited in better living conditions.

Facing the dangers of this sea voyage is a bet for tomorrow, for happiness. In an inhospitable rural environment, this pair of lovers subsist, stricken by poverty, hunger, health insecurity, and the absolute lack of opportunities. The description of the setting - solved by Suffren with dramatic economy - makes it possible to explain the characters' decisions; no words are needed. In a certain scene, Mirlande, pregnant, resignedly picks up her fish stall, her face dismayed and her body exhausted; in this brief sequence, her uneasiness becomes apparent and François' American dream is justified.

When François comments to his wife, during dinner, in the dim light of the small house where they live, that a boat will soon be leaving for the United States, and that he should take advantage of the opportunity, she immediately replies, with an expression of astonishment: "What am I going to do alone without you? A moment later, they both frolic, embrace, and laugh loudly in bed, excited by the very idea of a better life. The danger of the journey fades for a few seconds.

This story is woven under the declared purpose of addressing the migration tragedy in Haiti. But the filmmaker is not interested in the inhuman hardships of the crossing, in the accidents of the journey; perhaps the profile most attended to by cinema. Suffren - who competes with this film at the IV INSTAR Film Festival (December 4-10) - takes the focus away from the experience of those who leave and places it on those who stay; he examines the impact of emigration on those who wait, in silence, like Mirlande, suffocated by uncertainty and loneliness.

Without too many parliaments or dramatic accents, with a limpid handling of the emotional curves of the characters, Suffren describes the inner schism of a woman who, after ten years, still hopes to be reunited with her husband. With no news, with her son grown up, she does not know if François has reached his destination or perished in the attempt. However, nothing will make her give up the man she once swore to love on the waters where she now evokes Agwe.

One of the virtues of this short film is its intelligent dramatic articulation. The story is not plotted as a succession of actions, as a chain of causes and effects, as might be expected after the first few minutes. Once the characters are introduced, the ethos of the village is described, and the director rehearses some subtle temporal curves and visual and narrative ellipses that, in addition to conferring synthesis to the story, favor its penetration into the affective and familiar cosmos of the characters. The organic time jump that shifts the plot by about ten years is striking; in this way, the wear and tear and, at the same time, the resistance of the protagonist, now accompanied by the child, naïve, perhaps, before the mother's pain, is underlined at a dramatic level and described at a visual level. A succession of contemplative shots - of documentary quality and iconically elaborated - define Mirlande's existential abyss.

One moment is particularly effective, not only in terms of dramatic construction but also in terms of discourse construction: the one in which the wedding of the protagonists is staged on a boat in the middle of the sea. It is not clear whether these images emanate from Mirlande's memories or are products of her imagination. A fleeting shot reveals the son's face as the parents confess their love for each other; we no longer know if these images are a dream of the protagonist, incited by loss, or a memory tainted by the pain of a long wait. In its poetic visual presentation, this sequence sums up the deep sadness of this woman and explains her decision to take the path of the sea.

From 'Agwe' (Haiti, 2022); Samuel Suffren (IMAGE estivaldecineinstar.com)

At the visual level, the dominant register is naturalistic, marked by the slovenliness of a hand-held camera that accompanies the movements of characters. But this slovenliness is transformed into virtue, into style, whenever it describes with certainty the environment, a geography that exudes the same despair that has led François to choose emigration. Close-ups of the actors' faces also abound; their expressive interpretations condense in each glance the suspension that the characters inhabit.

At the beginning and end of Agwe, Mirlande is heard invoking the ocean loa vodu: "The body's best friend is the sea. Its waves bring hope, the hope of a better life elsewhere." That hope is all these people have. With the sea at their feet, emigration is, for many Haitians, the beginning and end of their lives.

For Cuba, the INSTAR Film Festival is screening this short fiction film from December 4 to 10 through the online platform Festhome. It will also arrive this Tuesday in Argentina when it will be screened at the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires; on December 5, 6, and 7 it will be shown at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City, and on Thursday 7 it will be presented at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona, Spain.

You can read the original note here

Agwe la espera como destino Read More »

The IV INSTAR Film Festival as a "space of audiovisual resistance". A conversation with José Luis Aparicio

By EDGAR ARIEL – December 3rd, 2023

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Still from 'El rodeo' (2021); Carlos Melián (Vimeo IMAGE / Estudio ST - Trailer)

Let's start at the beginning. What we know today as the INSTAR Film Festival, which will reach its fourth edition between December 4 and 10, had its origin as truth and potential in a retrospective curated by Cuban critic Dean Luis Reyes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The exhibition 'Cuban Cinema under Censorship' took place between March 9 and 11, 2018, linked to a personal exhibition by Tania Bruguera. Then, in 2019, with the organization and curatorship of actress and writer Lynn Cruz, the INSTAR Film Festival began. From that moment until now, it has been a platform for the presentation and exchange of Cuban films that have been made in coercive and totalitarian environments. Peripheral environments. Dissident environments.

To find out what's new for this edition, we talked to filmmaker José Luis Aparicio, the artistic director of the festival of its last three editions. We want to know what it means to "Break the glass in case of emergency”, as suggested by the slogan of the IV INSTAR Film Festival.

Aparicio, the INSTAR Film Festival was founded in 2019. Four years later, how much has it mutated?

It has mutated as much as our lives and works have during this period. If one feature has defined the Festival, it’s that it can adapt, reflect, and enhance from its structure the changing and complicated circumstances of Cuban cinema and its creators.

The first edition, curated and organized by Lynn Cruz in 2019, was conceived as a physical event at INSTAR's Havana headquarters. It was a sort of culmination of the monthly shows hosted by the Institute at the time, also organized by Lynn, where important retrospectives of the works of Miguel Coyula, Fausto Canel, Jorge Molina, and Eliecer Jimenez, to mention just a few names, were held.

That first festival presented a non-competitive exhibition, grouped into thematic sections and focused on specific filmmakers. Although independent Cuban productions predominated, a feature preserved to this day, some works by foreign authors were also exhibited, including a retrospective of Costa Rican filmmaker Ishtar Yasin. I should mention, as a great antecedent of these early initiatives, the showcase ‘Cuban Cinema under Censorship’, curated by Dean Luis Reyes at MoMA, linked to Tania Bruguera's solo exhibition at the museum.

When I started curating the Festival, in the second edition of 2021, I had the experience of Cuban Cinema in Quarantine, a project I developed together with Katherine Bisquet and the support of Rialta: an online platform that has been running since the beginning of the pandemic. The situation of the country and its artists had changed drastically. We had just experienced the San Isidro strike, the protests of 27N and 11J, the brutal repression, and the political prisoners. As for cinema, there had been the censorship of 'Dreams Adrift' and the cancellation of the Young Filmmakers' Showcase, the event that best served, for almost twenty years, the country's alternative audiovisual production.

José Luis Aparicio

It was more necessary than ever to gather, display, and discuss the films made in those recent, dark, and turbulent times, yet also very fertile for our cinema, as most of them had not been properly showcased. The impossibility of organizing a physical event in Havana due to the surveillance and repression of the Cuban State Security forced us to look for virtual alternatives. We decided to prepare an online edition through the Festhome platform and INSTAR's social media, with the organizational and programming support of Sindy Rivery.

This second edition kept the non-competitive format. The films, mostly Cuban -although there were a handful of pieces from Latin America and the Caribbean- were again grouped into thematic sections. Highlights included special presentations of pieces such as 'In a Whisper' (2019, dir. Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez), 'I Want to Make a Film' (2020, dir. Yimit Ramírez) and 'Blue Heart' (2021, dir. Miguel Coyula), essential films of the recent Cuban cinema that had barely been seen on the island. In the talks and debates, we were joined by important foreign guests such as Swiss Milo Rau, Mexican Alonso Ruizpalacios, and Argentinian Alejandro Fadel.

Last year, we went to Kassel, Germany, to present the exhibition 'Land Without Images’, the largest retrospective of alternative Cuban cinema to date, with more than 160 works from the last seven decades. This exhibition was one of INSTAR's activities at ‘documenta fifteen’, so we consider it our third edition. It was conceived in the context of a massive exodus of thousands of Cubans, including a large part of the island's artistic and intellectual community. From one moment to the next, most of the filmmakers that INSTAR had accompanied through the Festival and initiatives such as the P.M. Fund were living and creating in different parts of exile.

INSTAR Film Festival at documenta fifteen (2022), in Kassel, Germany (IMAGE Courtesy of INSTAR Film Festival)
Isaac Godfrey Geoffrey Nabwana's talk on Wakaliwood - Prince Claus Fund Mobile Lab. INSTAR Film Festival at documenta fifteen (2022), in Kassel, Germany (IMAGE Courtesy of the INSTAR Film Festival)

Where do we set the headquarters of an event whose fundamental impulse has been the promotion and exhibition of Cuban independent cinema, when its homeland is inaccessible? How can we choose a point, fix an axis, among the multiple places of an ever-expanding diaspora? Isn’t the nation a more complex entity than the one defined by geographical limits and political extremes?

Since Kassel, we began formulating these questions and dreaming of the idea that brings us to this fourth edition: the possibility of reinventing the festival in the image and likeness of our guild, culture, and simulacrum of a country. If Cuban cinema today is a transnational entity, a phenomenon without a center, a sort of rhizome, then the INSTAR Film Festival must be an event in correspondence, one that knows how to capture the multiplicities and enhance this absence of center, of territory. A project that expands in all directions and takes advantage of everything that can be fertile in these new circumstances.

The IV INSTAR Film Festival will take place during the week of December 4-10, 2023, with screenings in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, Miami, New York, and São Paulo. Most of the program will be available for Cuba through the virtual platform Festhome. Additionally, there will be lectures, debates, and master classes that will be transmitted through the Institute's social media. This hybrid, multiple, and simultaneous structure will be the new format of our Festival.

What characteristics do you think distinguish this festival from others around the world?

I have no idea what could distinguish us from so many other festivals, considering the variety and degree of specialization these events reach nowadays. And, more than anything, their proliferation, which mainly stems from necessity. Although even the big festivals face the question of their survival every year, this does not stop the emergence of small initiatives like ours, whose vocation is to make more daring, personal, and counter-hegemonic works visible.

Yes, I can mention some features that identify us. The concept that guides us is the transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema, whether it is made inside or outside the island. This is evidenced not only in the means of production but also in the different geographies it occupies, its aesthetic and thematic searches, as well as the new contexts of life and creation of its artists. One of our goals is to present to increasingly diverse audiences some of the most relevant works of contemporary Cuban cinema.

These films will be in dialogue, starting this year, with films by filmmakers whose socio-political and artistic production circumstances are close to ours (for example, in this edition, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, and the Philippines). We are interested in generating spaces for exchange and feedback between cinematographies that suffer from the neglect, censorship, and persecution of authoritarian governments.

Many filmmakers from these regions of the global south where freedom of expression and creativity are seriously threatened also live and work in exile. Many of them are also not allowed to return to their countries, like so many Cuban artists and citizens. The human and creative conflict that this situation implies, as well as the ways to address it through cinematographic language, is an issue that interests us as a festival, not only from the curatorial point of view but also as a theme to be addressed in our spaces for thought and reflection.

Another feature that defines us, emphasized from this edition onwards, is the itinerancy of the event and its ambition of ubiquity. This is an experiment that we hope to consolidate in the future. Our festival aspires to be a space of audiovisual resistance. A kind of hydra that, in the face of each totalitarian attack, grows two new heads out of the gash.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the institutions, organizations, cultural centers, theaters, and museums that have welcomed us. And also to the tireless INSTAR team, guided by the passion of Tania Bruguera and sustained by the dedication of our producer Leila Montero.

Posters of the IV INSTAR Film Festival (IMAGE: festivaldecineinstar.com)

What are the specific new features of this edition of the event?

In addition to the new itinerant, simultaneous, and transnational format, this fourth edition will present for the first time a competitive section. Fifteen recent titles, including short, medium, and feature films of different genres, produced between 2020 and the current year, aspire to the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award, which will be granted by an international jury to the work that best addresses, from the audiovisual creation, a controversial topic of its corresponding society.

We are fortunate to have a prestigious jury, comprised of Brazilian film critic and historian Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Cuban screenwriter and film producer Alejandro Hernández, and Bosnian academic and researcher Dunja Fehimović, to whom we are deeply grateful for their time and dedication.

Some of the most relevant Cuban films of recent times are present in our curatorship: 'Option Zero' (2020, dir. Marcel Beltrán), 'Mafifa' (2021, dir. Daniela Muñoz), 'Abyssal' (2021, dir. Alejandro Alonso), 'The Pure Ones' (2021, dir. Carla Valdés), 'The Rodeo' (2021, dir. Carlos Melián), 'Veritas' (2022, dir. Eliecer Jiménez), 'Roads of Lava' (2023, dir. Gretel Marín) and 'Calls from Moscow' (2023, dir. Luis Alejandro Yero). We will also host the world premieres of 'Women Dreaming of a Nation' (2023, dir. Fernando Fraguela) and 'A Man Under His Influence' (2023, dir. Emmanuel Martín).

The international selection includes films of great aesthetic diversity: 'Taxibol' (2023), by Italian director Tommaso Santambrogio, a hybrid medium-length film shot in Cuba, with the presence of the great Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz; 'Leaves of K.' (2022), a short animated documentary by Nicaraguan Gloria Carrión; 'Windows' (2022), a self-referential essay by Venezuelan Jhon Ciavaldini; 'Agwe' (2022), a short fiction film by Haitian Samuel Suffren; and 'And How Miserable is the Home of Evil' (2023), an unclassifiable political piece by Iranian Saleh Kashefi. The vast majority of the films in the selection are preceded by selections at some of the world's most important festivals: Berlin, Locarno, IDFA, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, and Visions du Reel, to name a few.

Along with the titles in the competition, thirteen other films will be screened as Special Presentations. A retrospective of the cinematographic work of Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, a couple of Cuban filmmakers living and working in exile since 1965, stands out in this section. This exhibition will include five short films produced in the United States between 1970 and 1980, closely linked to the New York underground film movement of the time.

Two of these films, 'Apollo, Man to the Moon' (1970, dir. Fernando Villaverde) and 'To my Father' (1973, dir. Miñuca Villaverde), can be seen on the afternoon of December 9 in New York as part of two sessions of experimental Cuban cinema hosted by the e-flux Screening Room. This specific section is completed by two short films by Alejandro Alonso, 'The Son of the Dream' (2016) and 'Home' (2019), and the North American premiere of 'The Winter Campaigns (2019), the first feature film by Rafael Ramirez.

Still from ‘The Winter Campaigns’ (2019, Cuba-Venezuela-México); Rafael Ramírez (Picture Courtesy of the Festival de Cine INSTAR)

Special presentations also include the Paris premiere of 'Blue Heart' (2021, dir. Miguel Coyula) at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris and spotlight the work of two important Cuban filmmakers in their new cities of residence. We refer to the screenings of Marcel Beltrán's 'Nighthouse' (2016) and 'The Music of the Spheres' (2018) at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo and Ricardo Figueredo's 'The Cuban Theory of the Perfect Society' (2019) and 'The Post' (2023) at the General San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.

I would also like to mention our inaugural activity, which will take place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), on Monday, December 4 at 6:30 pm. Film critic and journalist Dean Luis Reyes will host the talk " The photos of the collapse: Cuban cinema and uncertainty", before the screening of 'Option Zero', a fundamental film to understand the most recent Cuba, especially the migratory crisis that its citizens are going through.

It has been said that the Festival favors "audiovisuals with daring aesthetic and narrative proposals, as well as hybrid pieces that explore new paths of realization", and that it is also dedicated to a transgeneric experience.

The Festival is conceived as a space of cultural resistance at the intersection between cinema, visual arts, and activism. We are interested in daring artistic visions, not only because of their counter-hegemonic readings of reality or their more or less direct confrontation with specific repressive apparatuses but also because of the expressive search developed by the authors.

A revolutionary discourse that differs from the dominant currents needs an avant-garde aesthetic that broadens the limits and possibilities of audiovisual language while questioning the society that surrounds it. These are the works we want to show: uncomfortable films that often struggle to find their way into a conventional exhibition circuit.

Our event is dedicated to those auteurs who not only challenge the status quo, often risking their lives and careers, but also the constraints imposed by the industry, the major festivals, and the film canon itself. In this sense, we are committed to the transgeneric, to those artifacts that move freely between different genres and ways of representation.

I believe that taxonomies are increasingly insufficient and unnecessary to address the creative potential of the contemporary audiovisual universe. In our event, it is not important to separate or differentiate documentary film from fiction film or short film from feature film. Everything is audiovisual creation and deserves the same degree of attention.

The award will have a name, Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Why is this tribute important?

Any tribute to Nicolás Guillén Landrián will always be necessary and somewhat insufficient, especially if we consider the importance of his cinema and the little attention it received for several decades. Fortunately, in the last twenty years, his work has been rescued by critics, academics, and researchers of Cuban and regional cinema, largely thanks to events such as the now-defunct Young Filmmaker's Showcase. And even more importantly, his films have been assimilated by several generations of filmmakers on the island, for whom he has become a sort of guiding figure.

‘Landrián’ (2022); Ernesto Daranas (IMAGEN YouTube / Altahabana Films – Trailer)

This prize, initially awarded through INSTAR's P.M. Fund, has been relaunched this year within the festival. We can think of no better way to recognize those incisive creators who address the contradictions and conflicts of their immediate social contexts with absolute formal freedom and profound iconoclasm. Now that Nicolasito's surviving works have been restored and his name is recognized among the classics at the Venice Film Festival, it is more necessary than ever to continue recovering those films buried by censorship, neglect, and oblivion. The INSTAR Film Festival also participates in this collective work to rewrite the history of our cinema, and to highlight its alternative images.

You can read the original note here

Espacio de resistencia audiovisual Read More »

Calls from Moscow'... to a disconnected line in Havana

By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - december 2nd, 2023

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Still from 'Calls from Moscow' (2023); Luis Alejandro Yero (IMAGE YouTube / Costa Rica International Film Festival).

This week, filmmaker Luis Alejandro Yero denounced on social media the censorship of his film 'Calls from Moscow' (2023) by Cuban cultural authorities, who excluded it - after it had been admitted by the selection committee, according to what the filmmaker learned unofficially- from the competition of the 44th Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana. Recently, Vladimir Putin's government announced that all public LGTBIQ+ activities were banned in Russia.

'Calls from Moscow' addresses the current socio-political circumstances in Russia and Cuba. But these are esoteric interpretations that concern the macro-historical narrative. On a micro-historical level, this feature film investigates and reveals each tiny space inhabited by its young queer characters exiled in the Russian capital. Dariel Díaz, Daryl Acuña, Eldis Botta, and Juan Carlos Calderón go from the living room to the balcony, to the bathroom, to the elevator of a small apartment. And they all meet again through their cell phones, in that "tiny" environment where they spend a good part of their lives and where they find their freedom. These young people aren’t free in Havana or Moscow but in their telephones. Their recent freedom lies in keeping in touch with their families, expressing themselves as influencers on TikTok, and seeing the "success" stories they have been denied. Yero presents the cell phone as a real and symbolic tool, through which we glimpse the psychology of his characters, and links this with the social importance that this technology and Internet connection has had in Cuba in recent years.

There are plenty of prestigious places where this filmmaker's first feature-length documentary has been screened. Those citizens of the world who wish to see it can do so now thanks to the IV INSTAR Film Festival: December 5, at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa (Barcelona, Spain); December 8 and 10, at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda (Mexico City); December 9, at the General San Martin Cultural Center (Buenos Aires), and on December 10, at the Cinemateca Brasileira (Sao Paulo).

There is no doubt that such presentations at this transnational event led to its exclusion from the screens of the Havana Film Festival because in no way can problems of aesthetic quality be adduced in the most recent film by the young Cuban filmmaker, who already won in 2018, with “The Olden Heralds”, the Coral Award for Best Documentary Short Film. And it was not even considered for any of the collateral shows.

Cultural censorship in Cuba has had as many motivations as there are people at risk of losing their institutional privileges in those circles. It is ultimately an exercise of arbitrary power based on the most banal ideology, never on aesthetic criteria. A banality that becomes transparent on a discursive scale through a repetitive bunch of slogans.

The events and characters depicted in 'Calls from Moscow' are not unfamiliar to the "coverage" of the Cuban state media; it is just that in this film, these institutions do not control the narrative. On this occasion, they cannot show in theaters the fragment where writer and activist Luis Dener is seen lashing out against the Cuban government. They cannot "give their opinion" about him and deconstruct his discourse in the middle of the film. Yero does not do this either because, even if he chose these particular sequences in the editing process, they are based on a diegetic reality. His characters consume information through the cell phone, which has already been legitimized, in his eyes, as a space of freedom.

As oppressive as Russian architectural structures are depicted in this documentary feature, diplomatic relations between Havana and Moscow are just as oppressive. The Russian government is one of the main allies of the Cuban authorities, and it is as intolerable to leave the island power in a bad light as it is to the Moscow government, especially in places as traditionally crowded as Havana's movie theaters in December.

In terms of traditional narratives in national documentary filmmaking, emigration finds an uncommon aspect in 'Calls from Moskow': the possibility of return. Emigrants have always been seen as someone who comes and goes, but to whom returning definitely would never be an option. However, in these characters’ journey, that seems to be a possible end for some of them. This could even be considered a "positive" discourse from the perspective of Cuban power if it were not for the fact that the country from which they return is, precisely, a very important political ally -and, of course, these guys would not return out of conviction but out of resignation.

Documentary 'Llamadas desde Moscú', by Luis Alejandro Yero (IMAGE YouTube / Costa Rica International Film Festival - trailer)

In that sense, Yero's film would open the possibility of a dialogue on the return of émigrés and on the conditions that would determine it, but that does not seem to have been a plot line that interested the government in Havana in its recent meeting with a selection of the Cuban diaspora.

'Calls from Moscow' returns to the idea that emigration is the main form of protest Cubans have found. Emigration has always been a difficult subject for national cinematography, immersed in an equally arduous dialectic with the political power, owner of the movie theaters, and the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). To date, a more conciliatory tone has been tolerated, often melodramatic. Otherwise, the subject has been approached from a "permissive" and comedic point of view. But Cuban emigration and its problems are becoming increasingly diverse and complex, not only in terms of gender and sexual identities, age groups, social origins, and political opinions but also in terms of trajectories and destination countries...

Certainly, as the popular saying goes: that is a conversation for which Cuban power is not, and does not want to be, ready.

You can read the original note here

Llamadas desde Moscú a una línea desconectada Read More »

INSTAR Festival kicks off, exploring new independent Cuban cinema

By NOELIA GÓMEZ - november 30th, 2023

infobae

The fourth edition of the event will take place from December 5 to 10 at the CC San Martín and is organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), directed by Tania Bruguera, and coordinated by filmmaker Ricardo Figueredo.

The fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival will take place from December 4-10, 2023, at venues in Barcelona, Paris, New York, Miami, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo. The festival will focus on the transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema, exploring its interaction with diverse cinematographies, especially those from countries ruled by authoritarian regimes that impose restrictions on artists. The event seeks to highlight the ever-growing dialogue between these cinematographies and to promote cultural diversity in cinema.

 

The festival's structure unfolds in an amalgam of carefully curated sessions, where each film finds its space to resonate and dialogue with audiences eager for new perspectives. From short films with immediate impact to in-depth documentaries that explore the complexities of contemporary society, the IV INSTAR Film Festival presents a program that defies expectations and promises intense emotions at every screening.

This fourth edition stands out for giving voice to silenced narratives and having a dialogue between diverse cinematographies (Credit: Festival INSTAR Press).

On the first day of the festival, Tuesday, December 5, the opening day will showcase works such as 'Agwe' by Samuel Suffren (Haiti), 'The Rodeo' by Carlos Melian (Cuba), and 'Abyssal' by Alejandro Alonso (Cuba-France). The two subsequent sessions will feature productions ranging from 'And How Miserable is the Home of Evil' by Saleh Kashefi (Switzerland-Iran) to 'Women Dreaming of a Nation', by Fernando Fraguela (Cuba), offering a diverse and captivating range of films.

On the first day of the festival, Tuesday, December 5, the opening day will showcase works such as 'Agwe' by Samuel Suffren (Haiti), 'The Rodeo' by Carlos Melian (Cuba), and 'Abyssal' by Alejandro Alonso (Cuba-France). The two subsequent sessions will feature productions ranging from 'And How Miserable is the Home of Evil' by Saleh Kashefi (Switzerland-Iran) to 'Women Dreaming of a Nation', by Fernando Fraguela (Cuba), offering a diverse and captivating range of films.

On Thursday, December 7, there will be a tribute to the cinematic past, with screenings of films such as ‘Apollo, Man to the Moon' by Fernando Villaverde (United States), and 'The Winter Campaigns' by Rafael Ramirez (Cuba-Venezuela-Mexico). The former shows New York City during the historic first landing of man on the moon, capturing the life, soundscapes, and atmosphere of its streets and inhabitants, and the latter is immersed in a house that seems to exist in an undefined space, where the main character of a video game lives with his family.

The Cultural San Martín will host the festival in Buenos Aires (Credit: Festival INSTAR Press)

The Festival's intensity continues on Saturday, December 9 with films such as 'Veritas' by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida (Cuba-United States). The documentary reveals the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in 1961, presented sixty years later through the voices of its protagonists. There will also be a screening of 'Roads of Lava' by Gretel Marín (Cuba), which follows the life of Afibola, an Afrofeminist poet, activist, and queer woman, and her eight-year-old son, Olorun, in downtown Havana.

On Sunday, December 10, the festival culminates with a selection of films featuring 'The Post', by Ricardo Figueredo Oliva (Cuba), which focuses on Havana, where a man experiences contact with a being from another planet while they discuss daily life and the consumption of illicit substances. There will also be a screening of 'Windows', by Jhon Ciavaldini (Argentina-Venezuela), which shows images of protests in Venezuela between 2014 and 2017, observed by citizens from their homes.

This fourth edition, which will take place not only in Buenos Aires but in multiple venues around the world, highlights the importance of giving voice to those whose narratives can be silenced. The connection between different cinematographies and the reflection on controversial topics in diverse societies are the guiding themes of this edition, whose objective is to promote dialogue between filmmakers from the global south and make visible the valuable work of Cuban independent cinema. According to the words of its artistic director, this edition represents a milestone as the first one conceived in exile, which poses a challenge in terms of its location without a defined center. How to choose a venue for an event that promotes Cuban independent cinema when the country is inaccessible? How to establish a focal point in an ever-expanding diaspora? The notion of a nation beyond geographical and political boundaries is questioned. It seeks to restructure the festival to reflect and enhance the current circumstances of the majority of exiled filmmakers.

Under the direction of Tania Bruguera and filmmaker Ricardo Figueredo, this edition vindicates freedom of expression in the cinematographic world (Credit: Festival INSTAR Press).

The curatorial proposal brings together significant works of Cuban cinema of this decade, showing diverse poetics that build the backbone of a New Cinema. This artistic movement transcends generations, with a growing awareness of its hybrid and transnational character, seeking to break with classical Cuban cinema rather than bow to it. These works explore multiple facets of Cuba: socioeconomic crisis, the impact of totalitarianism, racism, homophobia, education, generational disappointment, historical re-reading, political repression, and diaspora. In addition, filmmakers from other regions, such as Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, and the Philippines, whose realities dialogue with those of Cuba, creating a dialogue between their stories through film.

The festival also proposes meeting spaces, such as talks and debates, to reflect on diverse artistic practices. INSTAR seeks to disseminate and seize cultural fertility and liberation in a fragmented landscape, addressing the conflict faced by the millions of exiled Cubans. The purpose is to create a corridor of images between the scattered points of the exile, with the hope of reconnecting with the island and its complex versions through film.

The IV INSTAR Film Festival, in addition to its function as a film showcase, will award the prestigious Nicolás Guillén Landrián Prize to the work that best explores a taboo subject of its society through audiovisual creation. This award, accompanied by a fund to support the award-winning artist's next work, pays tribute to the legacy of Cuban documentarian and painter Nicolás Guillén Landrián, whose work continues to resonate and defy boundaries to this day.

This event immerses itself in new Cuban cinema, exploring its interaction with diverse cinematographies, particularly those coming from countries with dictatorial or authoritarian regimes (Credit: INSTAR Festival Press).

The panel of jurors selected for the Festival is composed of: Alejandro Hernández, a screenwriter, novelist, and film producer from Havana, Cuba, known for his Best Adapted Screenplay Goya Award for 'All the Women' (2013), and nominations for works such as "'Cannibal' (2013), 'The Author' (2017), 'As Long as the War Lasts' (2019), and 'Adú' (2021). Dunja Fehimović, originally from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Newcastle. Finally, Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, a journalist, film critic, and historian born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who left a significant mark in the exploration of Latin American cinema and has been a member of the surrealist movement in São Paulo and Paris.

With workshops, debates, master classes, and exhibitions, the IV INSTAR Film Festival promises an enriching experience for film lovers and anyone eager for fresh and challenging perspectives. It is an event that transcends geographic and artistic boundaries to celebrate diversity, creative freedom, and the courage to tell stories that deserve to be heard in an ever-changing world.

The message from the Cuban Ministry of Culture

On the other hand, the Cuban Ministry of Culture launched a campaign against the INSTAR Film Festival. It has been criticized for including the film 'Veritas', by Cuban Eliécer Jiménez Almeida, which deals with the experience of the 2506th Assault Brigade, considered mercenaries by official Cuban history. The official press has accused the festival of glorifying terrorism against Cuba by showing this feature film. The Minister of Culture, Alpidio Alonso Grau, and other officials have questioned the legitimacy of the festival and the freedom it defends, accusing it of being financed by the CIA and of attacking the collective project of the Cuban people. Miami-based filmmaker Eliécer Jiménez Almeida, author of 'Veritas', has responded to the accusations by stating that his film is not backed by the CIA or imperialist interests, and points out that it seeks to show an alternative version of the official history without imposing an ideology.

*For the complete program in all different countries and the details of this year's edition, please visit the festival's website.

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INSTAR calls for its IV Film Festival in seven cities around the world

By CAMILA ACOSTA – november 29th, 2023

CUBANET

"The concept guiding this edition is the transnational character of the new Cuban cinema," said the organizers of the event.

Poster of the IV INSTAR Film Festival (Image: International Institute of Artivism / Hannah Arendt / FB)

HAVANA, Cuba. - From December 4 to 10, the fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival will be held in seven cities around the world with a large presence of Cuban emigrants: Barcelona, Paris, New York, Miami, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo.

In the case of Cuba, the selection of films will be available online through the Festhome platform. "The concept guiding this edition is the transnational character of New Cuban Cinema, as well as its growing dialogue with diverse cinematographies, especially those from countries also ruled by authoritarian governments," details the event's program.

The Festival is an annual event organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), a collective founded and directed by Cuban performer Tania Bruguera, and curated by Cuban filmmaker José Luis Aparicio.

The first festival took place in Havana in December 2019 and was directed by actress and writer Lynn Cruz. The competition was interrupted for two years by the COVID-19 pandemic and resumed in late 2021, but only online.

The third edition took place in July 2022 at Documenta Fifteen in Kassel, Germany, and consisted of the screening of Land without Images, the largest retrospective of alternative Cuban cinema to date, according to festival organizers.

The current edition will feature an international jury made up of Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Brazilian critic and historian and one of the authorities on Latin American cinema; Dunja Fehimović, academic specializing in Caribbean cinema and university professor in the UK; and Cuban screenwriter Alejandro Hernández, winner of the Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2013 for Todas las mujeres, by Spanish filmmaker Mariano Barroso.

This jury will award the PM Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award to the film, Cuban or otherwise, "that best reflects a controversial subject." In addition to screenings, the festival organizes workshops, debates, master classes, and expanded cinema exhibitions. Guests from previous editions include filmmakers Milo Rau, Ishtar Yasin, Alonso Ruizpalacios, Alejandro Fadel, Heidi Hassan, Alejandro Brugués, and Miguel Coyula.

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INSTAR Festival celebrates its fourth edition in transnational format

ByYelly Barrios. – November 30th, 2023

LatAm cinema.com

Organized by the International Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR), the festival will take place from December 4 to 10, for the first time in multiple venues, on-site and virtual, in Latin America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. As the festival's artistic director, José Luis Aparicio Ferrera, told LatAm cinema, "The goal is to create a corridor of images between different geographies, a network that will help alleviate the dispersion and isolation (of the Cuban diaspora) and bring us together again at the cinema."

The International Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) was created in 2015 as a space to give voice to suppressed, censored, and banned stories, and to promote civic literacy and social justice in Cuba. Three years later, its founder, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, inaugurated a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In that context, and as a collateral activity to the exhibition, MoMA organized the show ‘Cuban Cinema under Dictatorship’ with the participation of Cuban filmmakers and cinephiles such as Orlando Jimenez Leal, Miguel Coyula, Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti, Eliecer Jimenez Almeida, film critic Dean Luis Reyes, and Bruguera herself. It was there, "in an after-dinner conversation where we talked about independent film production on the island," Bruguera recalls, that the INSTAR Film Festival was born as a support network for Cuban filmmakers, and also the PM Award, named in tribute to the 1961 documentary of the same name directed by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Sabá Cabrera, considered a paradigm of institutional censorship of Cuban cinema for more than half a century. 

In 2020, the first edition of the festival was held in Havana. The second one took place online due to pandemic restrictions, and the next one coincided with the retrospective of alternative Cuban cinema, "Land Without Images," held as part of the fifteenth Documenta in Kassel, Germany. Finally, in this fourth edition, the festival becomes transborder as a reflection of the "transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema”, in the words of Aparicio Ferrera.

For her part, festival director Tania Bruguera told LatAm cinema: "This fourth edition in such a diverse international arena will help filmmakers, especially Cuban filmmakers, think about and discuss the narrative and aesthetic challenges that come with making films in exile. Another aspect to consider is the lack of spaces for these works inside of Cuba, especially after the indefinite cancellation of the Young Filmmaker Showcase, the festival that most consistently attended to this production. The criminalization of independent projects and spaces on the island hinders the emergence of alternatives, but, fortunately, several projects like ours, located in different parts of the diaspora, manage to exhibit Cuban films and keep the debate on our cinema alive," Bruguera stressed.

The transnational character of the fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival is a way to be present in cities with a large number of Cuban exiles and at the same time generate new audiences and reflect the different circumstances that independent Cuban film production is going through.

The Latin American venues for this fourth edition of the festival will be the Alameda Art Laboratory Museum in Mexico City, the San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, the São Paulo Cinematheque, the Contemporary Art Museum of the University of São Paulo, and the FestHome Platform, where online programming for Cuba will be screened. In the United States, the festival will take place between the E-Flux Screening Room in New York, and Florida International University in Miami. In Europe, the program will be presented in Barcelona, at the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona and the Zumzeig Cinema Cooperative, and in Paris, at the Maison de l'Amérique latine. "This fourth edition is the first conceived in exile. This explains, perhaps, its lack of a center," the festival's artistic director, Luis Aparicio Ferrera, told LatAm cinema.

In addition to the novelty of multiple venues, in 2023, there is also a section of films in competition, two of which are world premieres: the documentary 'Women Dreaming a Nation' by Fernando Fraguela Fosado (Cuba, Spain, Mexico, United States) and the feature film 'A Man Under His Influence' (Canada, Cuba). The remaining films in competition from the region are: 'Abyssal,' a documentary by Alejandro Alonso (Cuba, France); 'Roads of Lava,' a documentary directed by Gretel Marín Palacio (Cuba); 'The Rodeo' by Carlos Melián Moreno (Cuba); ‘Option Zero' a documentary by Marcel Beltrán (Cuba, Brazil, Colombia); 'Leaves of K.', an animated documentary by Gloria Carrión Fonseca (Nicaragua, Costa Rica); 'Calls from Moskow', a documentary by Luis Alejandro Yero (Cuba, Germany, Norway); ‘The Pure Ones', a documentary by Carla Valdés León (Cuba); 'Mafifa', a documentary by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (Cuba); 'Taxibol' (2023), a hybrid film directed by Tommaso Santambrogio (Cuba, Italy); 'Veritas', a documentary by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida (Cuba, United States); and 'Windows', a documentary by Jhon Ciavaldini (Venezuela, Argentina). 

Simultaneously, 13 other films will be shown as Special Presentations, including a retrospective on Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, as well as ‘Nighthouse' and ‘The Music of the Spheres’ by Marcel Beltrán (Cuba, United States); ‘The Son of the Dream’ and ‘Home’ by Alejandro Alonso (Cuba); ‘The Cuban Theory of the Perfect Society’ (Cuba) and ‘The Post’ (Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico) by Ricardo Figueredo; and ‘The Winter Campaigns’ by Rafael Ramírez.

The program will also include conferences, debates, and master classes. Many of them can be followed through the Festival's social media.

You can read the original note here

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‘Leaves of K.’ or of impregnable fragility.

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS -November 28th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

When the Argentine essayist Luis Gusmán analyzes, in his book Kafkas (Edhasa, 2014), Franz Kafka's use of the initial K in his diaries and novels as a sign of an identity besieged and obliterated by sociopolitical forces, he wonders whether "the abolition of the identity of the Jewish person is the prefiguration of the subsequent elimination of the Jewish body?"

Thus, he endorses the perspective of the French critic Marthe Robert when she writes in 'Franz Kafka's Loneliness' (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982) that in 'The Trial' and 'The Castle' there is an identity annulment: "In the end, he only lets the man subsist, reduced to a simple expression, the man truly without attributes in whom only the last core of what is human survives".

The identities and bodies of the Nicaraguan women that filmmaker Gloria Carrión Fonseca encapsulates in the collective protagonist of her film Hojas de K. (2022) have also been victims of ferocious attempts to suppress them, to dilute them into oblivion, to banish them definitively from the human condition, to decompose their humanities into unrecognizable fragments, without dignity or will.

Carrión Fonseca also seems to reverse the dire meaning of the Kafkaesque "K" and turns it into a symbolic challenge to the repressive pretensions of Daniel Ortega's regime. She provides women with a common identity whose collective plea can achieve a powerful resonance in the reality of their country and shatter the hegemony of their supposed absolute rulers.

Poster of 'Hojas de K.' (2022). (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

K. is also an identity that protects, a fortified capsule that does not naively give away the names of the politically persecuted women still living in the Central American nation so that they will not be punished again, this time for offering their testimonies about the punishment. Thus, it results in a denial of the silence with which it has been intended to erase the history written by them during the popular uprisings that broke out in 2018 against the Ortega regime.

'Leaves of K.' falls within the realm of the "animated documentary" and, as part of the official selection of the IV INSTAR Festival, it will be available for Cuban audiences on the Festhome platform from Monday, December 4 to Sunday, December 10, always from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. On Tuesday 5, and also on the 10th of that month, it will be screened at the Argentinian host of the event, the General San Martin Cultural Center, in Buenos Aires, while on Wednesday 6, it will be screened at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona, Spain. The Alameda Art Laboratory in Mexico City has also scheduled its screening for Friday, December 8, and Sunday, December 10.

Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)
Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

The aesthetics and filmic style of the animated documentary have served as an ideal device for dealing with the threatened testimonies of the victims of contemporary totalitarianism, whose protagonists either cannot be revealed in order to protect them and their families, as is the case with the young Afghan refugee starring 'Flee' (Jonas Poher Rasmusen, 2021), or have fled so stripped of any documentation of their past that they require an almost complete recreation of their experiences. This is the case, for example, of Iranian visual artist Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel 'Persepolis' and co-director (with Vincent Paronnaud) of the film adaptation of the same name (2007); as well as North Korean filmmaker's Shin Dong-hyun, 2021, survivor of the Kim dynasty's concentration camps and protagonist of 'Camp 14' (Marc Wiese, 2012), and Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Pahn, who in 'The Missing Picture' (2013) recreates with dioramas his childhood during Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge revolution.

Carrión Fonseca dialogues more directly with Satrapi's visual style and opts for a simple aesthetic, almost like a child's doodles, with a seemingly rushed execution that helps underscore the urgency of her message, the haste of her denouncements. The shots of 'Leaves of K.' suggest images sketched in the darkness of a dungeon, which would be smuggled the next day beyond the bars into the world. The words of the collective protagonist compose brief and precise testimonies in which all the force of a last speech, of a single opportunity, is concentrated.

Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

Every word can be the last, and every revelation can be sealed by the end, so each has to carry universes. Every sentence must be resounding proof against repression and abuse. Absolute silence stalks the women who speak through K. Their bodies and identities merge into a sort of hydra. The multiple heads resist being severed.

K. is a multitude present, attentive, and resilient. It is a letter that accommodates all the phrases of the world, a letter that contains the sound of all the letters and embraces all the alphabets. It is a bleeding thorn that does not cease to bother its executioner gardener. It does not cease to manifest its existence, its presence. The tip does not become blunt; the stem hardens more and more each time.

Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

The voice, pure and free, without a throat to be silenced, without a head to be cut off, without a body to strike, and without a precise location in space, is perhaps what terrifies authoritarian powers the most. They have no choice but to eliminate the air so the sound does not propagate and gain ubiquity or to erase the memory using non-existent technologies.

The invisible omnipresence of the testimonies summarized in K. -interpreted by someone who identifies herself with the pseudonym Kochittacihuatl- and recreated by illustrators M455U, The Introvert Bee, animators Milo Otz, Lops Llorel, and Capi Mart- other fictitious names that protect threatened lives or endangered families under Ortega's shadows- eludes the beatings, rapes, and intimidations suffered by these women imprisoned during the 2018 demonstrations.

The air and the symbols cannot be locked up. The force of tyrannies is physical, and the incorporeal leads its minions and thugs to a dead end. The well-known "force of ideas" is a very expensive image for the propaganda machine of totalitarian political systems, one that does not take long to come back over their own heads like a justice boomerang. While repressive force and horror increase, oppressive ideologies dry up... They serve as compost for new and opposing ideologies.

Still from 'Hojas de K.' (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

The more the bodies of dissidents are punished, the faster they become fertile territories for the germination of emancipatory thought. Their fragility is impregnable and unbeatable, like the brief sylph in 'The Idea' (Berthold Bartosch, 1932), another classic of cinema and film animation encrypted in the essences of contemporary heirs such as 'Leaves of K'.

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Documenting the Feminine: Women Directors at the IV INSTAR Film Festival

By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - November 30, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Camino de lava' (2023); Gretel Marín Palacio (IMAGE YouTube / cineffable).

The IV INSTAR Film Festival will take place from December 4 to 10 with a film curatorship in which, although it is possible to talk about interconnected themes and aesthetics in a general sense, it is important to highlight the great mosaic of female characters created and recreated by the directors invited to the competition.

Women's narratives in cinema have been accused of defending the apparently intimate and making films "of few characters”, but it is precisely in these intimate searches where politics and the transformation of patriarchy have found the fiercest criticism. Although we are still discussing the figure of the director as the main axis within filmmaking, just a glance at the program will reveal women in professions that feminist film theory has long pointed out as key to a more equitable representation of the world through audiovisuals.

Thus, names like Daniela Muñoz Barroso, Carla Valdés León, or Nicaraguan Gloria Carrión Fonseca, who move between producing and directing, and Gretel Marín Palacio, who has moved from editing to directing, come to this edition. Their diverse poetics and different readings explore female characters that serve as a beacon for the construction of memory, of the nation, because, in the end, the homeland has always been more of a motherland than the heteropatriarchy has let on.

Mafifa, the Valdés-Serrano family, K., and Afíbola Sífunola are fragments of that motherland, which builds from memory and continues in a present from which it hopes to modify the future. This is how 'Mafifa' (2021), 'The Pure Ones' (2021), 'Leaves of K.' (2022) and 'Roads of Lava' (2023) can be appreciated respectively. Each director has built a personal relationship with the characters in their films and, although for taxonomic purposes we speak of documentary, each of the filmmakers has blurred the limits of this film genre, which, fortunately for free and daring spectators, is expanding more and more every day thanks to the many contaminations of what we call fiction.

In these four films, words build memory. Daniela Muñoz Barroso, from her sincerity as a woman and filmmaker, steps in front of the camera as a character in search of Mafifa's voice. It has always been said that listening is not exactly like hearing. The art of listening requires concentration and the ability to empathize with others. Thus, the filmmaker listens in every moment of her documentary feature, not only to what her characters have to say but also to the resonances of the bond she establishes with them through such listening. Reconstruction and recreation are mixed in ‘Mafifa’. The filmmaker selects detailed shots, and through them, the viewers are compelled to build their own versions of a woman with her, but also of a city, of a cultural rite, of a history.

Poster for 'Mafifa' (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso (IMAGE Courtesy of the IV INSTAR Film Festival).

Muñoz Barroso has been denied the pleasure of physically meeting his female character; Marín Palacio has not, and consequently, Afíbola becomes part of the creative team of 'Roads of Lava'. The representation of Afro-descendant women in Cuban cinema through a gaze in which they feel comfortable and can express themselves has not always been achieved in Cuban cinema. The question of representation versus representativeness of Cuban Afro-descendants gravitates over the island's audiovisual landscape.

Family and the different ways of building it are also a theme in these films. In that sense, the element "house" - although not new in cinema to illustrate or symbolize life, family, and home - is presented in 'Roads of Lava' as a symbol that runs parallel to the relationship built between mother and son, but also to what is desired for the son so that he can live in a country called Cuba.

The intimate physical space of a house also provides the context that brings together the characters in 'The Pure Ones'. Although pragmatically family has been constructed in a consanguineous way, both Carla Valdés and Gretel Marín expand that structure, for it is only through its resignification that memories can be reconstructed and contexts understood.

Poster of the film 'Camino de lava' (2023); Gretel Marín Palacio (IMAGEN festivaldecineinstar.com)

The material world is full of privileges, and the spirituality that emerges from this empty house, to be built, to be filled with memories, which Afíbola and her son Olorum will inhabit, is a possibility to which all people should have the right, as well as to be able to express themselves at their own pace, according to their identities, not only of gender but also cultural and historical.

A group of young people who are away from their parents and live together in a different country, in different houses, configure their familiarity, and through this, it is possible to unravel the analytical ideas and feelings of a past that feels doubly preterit, because "the pure ones" who appear in front of Valdés León's lens are not always able to explain with words what they lived through. And it is within the space in which the reunion takes place, and thanks to the "sharing of bread", that the philosophers succeed in grounding what they have lived and thus build a collective memory.

'The pure ones’, a colloquial expression of Cuban speech used to refer to parents or, in a more open sense, to people who are more or less over sixty years old, becomes a polysemic expression in the film. This group of people is returning in their memories to a "pure" stage, to a youth where they were hopeful in their personal projects, but also in a larger, collective project that even pretended to go beyond the country's meaning.

The stories told by these women directors come from the womb, and this has always been associated with the sentimental, or with childbirth, not only as a biological act but also as an act of creating or expelling from oneself. There are stories that the protagonists can tell while looking at the camera, and thus have the chance to purge them through their own audiovisual representation; in other cases, the protagonists cannot even show themselves, as in 'Leaves of K.', by Gloria Carrión Fonseca.

Poster of the film 'Los puros' (2023); Carla Valdés León (IMAGEN festivaldecineinstar.com)

Animation as a language is not only an "aesthetic" decision in this film: its protagonists still risk reprisals for telling and denouncing their experiences under the Nicaraguan regime of Daniel Ortega. Likewise, when we talk about conflicts involving physical and psychological violence against women and girls, there is a risk that the audiovisual exposure may end up re-victimizing them. Hence, the decision to animate and/or give life to K. became the necessary poetry to narrate -with testimony as the raw material- these harsh and violent events that continue to go unpunished.

The INSTAR Film Festival will also screen other feminine representations, such as 'Women Dreaming A Nation' (2023), a documentary in competition directed by Cuban Fernando Fraguela Fosado. It is a film born from the urgency to denounce the political situation in Cuba. It is also essential to mention the special presentations of films by Cuban Miñuca Villaverde. Her work, her way of understanding cinema, is a living example that the "intimate" stories of women -according to the label many have proclaimed- are not at odds with a search and expansion of cinematographic language.

Poster of 'Hojas de K.' (2022). (2022); Gloria Carrión (IMAGE hojasdek.com)

The connections established by the films of Carla Valdés León, Daniela Muñoz Barroso, Gretel Marín Palacio, and Gloria Carrión Fonseca start from the generic specificities of documentary and extend to the margins of the historical narrative in search of other women whose voices and memories are not only rescued as protagonists of these audiovisual representations but also from the sororal relationship that ideally imagines a good part of the feminist movement.

You can read the original note here

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#SOSVenezuela: about ‛Ventanas', a documentary by Jhon Ciavaldini

By ÁNGEL PÉREZ – November 29th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from the documentary 'Ventanas' (2023); Jhon Ciavaldini (IMAGE vimeo.com).

Ventanas (2023), the documentary by Jhon Ciavaldini competing in the IV Festival de Cine INSTAR, reminds me of the following verse by Carlos Augusto Alfonso: “Veo mi guerra desde lejos en viaje teleférico sobre país neutral” (I see my war from afar on a cable car journey over a neutral country). To the narrator/author of Ventanas, living far from Venezuela does not exclude him from his history. It is 2017, Ciavaldini talks on the phone from Buenos Aires with his mother about the crisis affecting his home country, about the dissatisfaction of the people with the government. On social media, he watches videos of citizen protests from that year and also from 2014, recorded by citizens from the windows of their apartments and shared as testimonies of the climate of terror they live in, of the repression with which the military body of the State responds to civilian demonstrations.

Away from his mother, struck by those images that circulate in networks (the windows from which to observe the tragic Venezuelan situation), the filmmaker articulates the documentary as an awareness of his place in that reality, as a return to himself and his condition as a migrant. In addition to a political statement on the degradation and violation of human rights in Venezuela, the film is an expression of a subjectivity lost among the images that bear witness to that reality.

The narrator comments: "It has never happened to me to have my body in one place and my head seven thousand kilometers away. Only those who have emigrated know what this is like. I wonder if I am leading a double life". Later on he stresses: "I only know that it is impossible to leave completely". And a little later he wonders: "Did leaving the country solve my problems or did it generate others that I didn't have before". The film is a record of his anguish as an emigrant facing the recent history of his country, which takes place seven thousand kilometers away and which, paradoxically, he sees passing before his eyes. And it is also the way in which Ciavaldini participates/acts directly, from exile, in that History.

Ventanas ties a family experience to the social sphere, the author's thoughts to the collective memory of the country. That is one of its virtues. The discursive landscape hangs on the filmmaker's voice, immersed in turn in that Venezuela of civic revolts and police violence, where, of course, emigration is another index of the crisis. The decision to use a first-person narrative, based on intimate experience, to address the Venezuelan issue, considerably enriches the film's discourse. Evidently, the perspective of Ventanas - the subjective resonances filtering the political and social facts - distances itself from any hegemonic or propagandistic narrative.

On at least two occasions Nicolás Maduro appears on television. The truth of the narrator is opposed to the truth wielded by the president, who faces the cameras with a child in his arms - his image could not be more prefabricated - while accusing the demonstrators of being mercenaries and fascists. There is no trace of the violence flooding the streets in these television shots. He does not say it exactly, but the narrator knows that the powers-that-be are trying to build a smokescreen. When the recordings shared on social networks are contrasted with Maduro's television interventions, the documentary eloquently exposes the objective violence: the military deployment in the streets and the precariousness of social life in the South American country.

These videos -containers of a social memory that escapes the control of power and its attempts to translate reality according to its ideological interests- are not only evidence of the political cataclysm, but also the certification that social life in Venezuela is largely experienced as pain, fear and death. Juxtaposed with the director's personal anguish, these archives express a human truth that constitutes the fundamental motif of Ventanas.

The human cost seems to be what most concerns the author, and then, of course, the freedom to dissent. Hence the insertion at the beginning of the documentary of an epigraph that reads: "Killing a man for defending an idea is not defending an idea, it is killing a man" (Sebastián Castellion).

Among many other important facts, at the end of the documentary we read that in Venezuela: "the situation continues, and more and more cases of human rights violations are coming to light, including arbitrary detentions, torture, sexual abuse, political persecution, forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions".

Poster of the documentary 'Ventanas' (2022); Jhon Ciavaldini (IMAGE festivaldecineinstar.com)

Peering into this reality - with Ciavaldini's film - is an invitation to political awareness. Through the windows of his apartment in Buenos Aires, the filmmaker can only see the cold plane of an architectural landscape: the buildings stand side by side, indifferent. In Venezuela, the sound of gunshots and the shouts of anonymous people determined to confront the powers-that-be drifts through the windows.

Still de ‘Ventanas’ (2022); Jhon Ciavaldini (IMAGEN vimeo.com – trailer)

During the IV INSTAR Film Festival, which will take place between December 4 and 10, Ventanas can be seen at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City (December 5, 6 and 7), at the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires (December 5 and 10), at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona, Spain (December 6), and in Cuba through the online platform Festhome (December 4).

You can read the original note here

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IV INSTAR Film Festival: Three Perspectives on the Cuban Migratory Crisis

By ÁNGEL PÉREZ – November 28th, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'The Zero Option' (2020); Marcel Beltrán (IMAGE YouTube / AFISilverTheatre - Trailer).

At the doorstep of the IV Festival de Cine INSTAR, I would like to draw attention to some of the perspectives that its program offers on emigration. Whether due to disagreements with political power or economic reasons, Cuba has experienced successive waves of migration from 1959 to the present. Given the volume of people who left at each moment and its immediate impact on the country, three migratory incidents are particularly addressed by those who ponder (researchers, artists, politicians...) the evolution of the Revolution: the so-called "historical exile" between 1959 and the early 1960s; the Mariel exodus in 1980, and the rafters' crisis between 1994 and 1995. To this chronology, we can now add the migratory crisis unleashed around 2015, which, with various peaks, extends to the present, conditioned both by the worsening of the already precarious daily life and by the awakening of a consciousness - and a civil society - that increasingly disagrees with the government. Towards this last chapter, three of the films in competition in the upcoming INSTAR festival direct their gaze: the documentaries La opción cero (Marcel Beltrán, 2020) and Llamadas desde Moscú (Luis Alejandro Yero, 2023), and the fiction Un homme sous son influence (Emmanuel Martín, 2023).

Cuban cinema has dealt with all these events, in one way or another, in its systematic vocation to take stock of the imprint of the Revolution on the island's life. Both ICAIC productions and those from the diaspora have shown their perspectives. Of course, filmic inquiries into the migratory issue have been considerably enriched in recent years, thanks, for example, to the emergence of independent cinema and the development of its transnational condition, the decentralization of the ICAIC, as well as the active dialogue between creations made inside and outside the island. The latter has been favored, among other reasons, by the traffic of contents through the Internet and, more specifically, by the emergence of events such as the Festival de Cine INSTAR  itself.

La opción cero, Llamadas desde Moscú and Un homme sous son influence deal, from the specificity of their plots, with emigration as an index of the state of suspension in which Cubans live today on the island, as a testimony of the failure of the project of society promised by the revolutionary discourse, and -ultimately- as evidence of a humanitarian crisis. And they achieve all this without their authors renouncing the purpose of consummating authentic cinematographic works; each of the visions of reality or the reflections contained in these films result from the aesthetic choices of Beltrán, Martín and Yero.

La opción cero delves into a camp of Cuban refugees in Panama City who, after crossing the Darien jungle, find themselves in a migratory limbo, hoping to reach the United States at some point. Calls from Moscow explores the experience of a group of young people stranded in the wintry Russian capital, just as war with Ukraine is about to break out. Un homme sous son influence looks at the daily life of a Cuban settled in Canada, who moves from one place to another, between different jobs, in dialogue with other immigrants, unable to consummate a love affair.

Still from ‛'A Man under his Influence''; Emmanuel Martín (IMAGE Courtesy of the filmmaker).

The three films have the greatest virtue in conceiving their plots as immersions in the emotional and rational universe of migrant individuals. Before escaping into the time of history - an aspect of particular concern to the filmmakers, themselves inscribed in their narratives - these films deal with the singular experiences of their characters. The crisis of the nation is experienced from the individual body (the very idea of nation is questioned/reformulated by these works). That is why Beltrán lets the videos taken by the people with their cell phones during the journey exhibit the pain and violence of those hours: their imperfections, their poor visual quality, are the aesthetic testimony of violent misfortunes. The erratic, wayward words of the protagonist of Un homme sous son influence, who tries to express ideas in very precarious English and French, are a metaphor of the impossibility of finding a complete version of himself in the midst of a cultural fracture. Yero's poetic approach to staging is the ideal way to apprehend, through the recording of the successive states of the body, the sensitive vibrations of his characters.

Yero rented an apartment in Moscow in order to explore the shaken subjectivities of Dariel Díaz, Daryl Acuña, Eldis Botta, Juan Carlos Calderón; there he staged their daily routines. In the documentary, each character seems to inhabit the place alone, and we see them sometimes lying on an armchair, sometimes in the kitchen talking on the phone, or lying in bed, sometimes working online, and sometimes recording reels for Instagram in the bathroom... This principle of realization somehow assumes the state of suspension in which the characters find themselves and favors their cuir identities to contaminate the form. The planned visual design, the static nature of the image, its pronounced plasticity, reinforce the sense of failure, encirclement, loneliness and uncertainty about the future. The complex gaze of Llamadas desde Moscú reveals in the subjectivity of its characters the departure from Cuba as success and the experience of immigration as failure; as it also happens in Un homme sous son influence.

For the young people in Calls from Moscow, the climate, the linguistic difference, the homophobic Russian laws and the illegal status make integration into the new reality complex, not to mention the health situation unleashed by the coronavirus and the symbolic gravitation of the war. For the eponymous protagonist of Emmanuel Martin's film - played by himself - the constant flight of a possible partner, played in each intervention by a different actress, is a mirror of his difficulties in consolidating ties with the country of destination; always surrounded by other migrants, always moving on the margins, he experiences a tension between the place of origin and the new context that subjects him to a vicious flight from himself.

Just as Martín assumes his protagonist, in an autofictional wink, Beltrán and Yero enter the scene in their documentaries, they let their voices be heard when they conduct interviews. This need to make transparent the instance that cuts out reality makes it clear that these films -especially documentaries, generically afflicted by a stubborn demand for objectivity- specifically convey the perspectives of the phenomenon that interest their authors.

Still from 'Calls from Moscow' (2023); Luis Alejandro Yero. Film included in the Forum section of the 73rd edition of the Berlin International Film Festival (February 16-26, 2023) (IMAGE www.berlinale.de)

From this underlining of the directorial self, La opción cero and Llamadas desde Moscú ask why someone chooses to emigrate and remain outside Cuba under such conditions. Un homme sous son influence also offers an answer to that question; the main character is shown between the jaws of labor and capitalist power, yet returning to his country is not an option for him. At one point, he tells some colleagues who are considering whether to visit the island on their vacation: "Cuba is really fucked up right now". When one of the guys informs Yero that he works in construction, the latter comments: "Working in construction is a pretty tough job, isn't it?", and the other immediately replies: "Yes, obviously, normally; but it was tougher to live in Cuba, unfortunately. I am not happy. But, to live in Cuba and live the needs that are being seen in the country, I prefer to be here". The same idea is revealed by one of the refugees in The Zero Option when he says to the camera: "Even if I have to go there, in that place, in that mountain, for a year, for however long... But I'm not going there, not even if I'm crazy. Forget about it. Are you crazy? I've spent a lot of work in Cuba".

Such is the existential drift of the Cuban as shown in these three films. Leaving the country is for each of these people the only way to take control of their destiny. They all seem convinced - no matter how fateful the journey to leave Cuba behind, or the circumstances in the host country - to "move on", to "wait", as they say in Llamadas desde Moscú.

Beltrán, Yero and Martín weave eloquent testimonies of the violence inherent to the migratory experience, as well as of the radical shock that the Cuban regime and the harshness of life on the island leave on individual sensibilities. In The Zero Option there is, I believe, a moment capable of condensing the political vision shared by the three films, the directors' views on the singular experiences of their respective characters. It is the sequence in which recordings of a celebration of the Armed Forces Day alternate with videos from social networks about the crossing of the Darien. In addition to marking the false triumphalism of the Cuban political discourse, it points to the historical responsibility of this ideological drift on the fate of the emigrants. In their explorations/testimonies on Cuban emigration today, La opción cero, Llamadas desde Moscú and Un homme sous son influence lay bare the despotism of the Cuban government, as the institutional body into which the 1959 Revolution has drifted.

Still from 'The Zero Option' (2020); Marcel Beltrán

Between the difficulties involved in leaving a country and making a life in another, and the sensation of triumph (perhaps temporary) experienced after leaving, Cuba is expressed in these films as trauma, condemnation, historical fatality... The island expels the Cuban, as much as the place of destination resists welcoming him or her.

You can read the original note here

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Opening of the fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival

November 27th, 2023

e-flux

Opening of the fourth edition

Festival de cine INSTAR

Del 4 al 10 de diciembre de 2023

The INSTAR Film Festival is an annual event organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), a collective founded by artist Tania Bruguera in 2015. The festival supports independent cinema production on an international scale, focusing on countries where art and freedom of expression is threatened. It favors works addressing difficult themes with daring aesthetics, as well as hybrid pieces exploring new paths in filmmaking.

The fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival will be held from December 4 to 10, 2023. Happening simultaneously at venues in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Miami, New York, Paris, São Paulo, and via Festhome in Cuba, the concept guiding this edition is the transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema. We want to enhance the ongoing dialogue such films have with other cinematographies, especially those of countries also ruled by authoritarian governments, and foster spaces for exchange between Cuban filmmakers and their counterparts from the Global South.

In competition, there are fifteen recent films by artists from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran and Italy. An international jury will award the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Prize to the film that best reflects and explores, through cinematic language, a taboo topic in their society. With this initiative, INSTAR pays tribute to the relevant work of Guillén Landrián, a Cuban documentary filmmaker and painter (Cuba, 1938–United States, 2003).

The festival will also screen thirteen other films as Special Presentations. This section includes a retrospective of Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, a couple of Cuban filmmakers exiled since 1965. We will present five of their films produced in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, several of them associated with the experimental and underground New York film scene of the period. Our companion program comprises masterclasses, workshops, and public debates.

The INSTAR Film Festival aims to promote and give visibility to Cuban Independent Cinema, a movement created under a repressive climate, censorship, and precarious production conditions. In recent decades, international recognition for this movement has grown, with awards and selections at leading film festivals.

The first edition of the festival took place in Havana in December 2019 and was directed by actress and writer Lynn Cruz. After the hiatus caused by the pandemic, the event resumed in 2021 as an online festival through the Festhome platform. Ever since filmmaker José Luis Aparicio has been in charge of the project as its curator and artistic director. The third edition, held in July of 2022 at documenta fifteen in Kassel, Germany, featured the exhibition Land Without Images, which would become the largest retrospective of alternative Cuban cinema to date, screening more than 160 audiovisual works.

Venues

-Barcelona, Spain: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) / Zumzeig Cinecooperativa

-Buenos Aires, Argentina: Centro Cultural General San Martín 

–Mexico City, Mexico: Laboratorio Arte Alameda

–Miami, USA: Florida International University (FIU)

–New York, USA: e-flux Screening Room 

–Paris, France: Maison de l’Amérique Latine

–São Paulo, Brazil: Cinemateca Brasileira / Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP)

–Cuba: Festhome Platform (online programming)

For further information on the screenings and activities, please visit our website.

For information about INSTAR, please visit instar.org.

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The INSTAR Film Festival will take independent Cuban cinema to eight countries.

DDC Madrid 

DDC

Image: ’Abyssal’, by Alejandro Alonso. DOCUMENTA MADRID

The fourth edition of the INSTAR film Festival has announced an ambitious program that will bring more than a dozen independent Cuban audiovisual films to eight major cities around the world, this time focusing on the work of exiled artists.

The festival, to be held from December 4 to 10 in movie theaters and cultural centers in Barcelona, Paris, Miami, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo, can be watched online from Cuba through the Festhome platform.

This edition of the event will be inaugurated on December 4 at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), with a lecture by Cuban critic and journalist Dean Luis Reyes and the screening of the feature-length documentary ‘Option Zero’, by Marcel Beltrán, selected in several international festivals, which gives voice to Cubans who have emigrated through the dangerous route of the Darien Gap, between Colombia and Panama.

The program also includes the feature films ‘Calls from Moskow’ (Luis Alejandro Yero, 2023); ‘A Man under His Influence’ (Emmanuel Martín, 2023), ‘Mafifa’ (Daniela Muñoz Barroso, 2021), and Veritas (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2022).

They are joined by ‘Abyssal’ (Alejandro Alonso, 2021), ‘Road of lava’ (Gretel Marín Palacio, 2023), ‘The Rodeo’ (Carlos Melián Moreno, 2021), ‘The Pure Ones’ (Carla Valdés León, 2021), ‘Women Dreaming a Nation’ (Fernando Fraguela Fosado, 2023) and ‘Taxibol’ (Tommaso Santambrogio, 2023).

Along with this selection of works by Cuban filmmakers or made in Cuba by foreign filmmakers, pieces by a handful of exiled non-Cuban artists will also participate: ‘Agwe’ (Samuel Suffren, Haiti), ‘And How Miserable is the Home of Evil’ (Saleh Kashefi, Iran), ‘Leaves of K.’ (Gloria Carrión Fonseca, Nicaragua) and ‘Windows’ (Jhon Ciavaldini, Venezuela).

The INSTAR Film Festival is an annual event organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), a collective founded and directed by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, and curated by filmmaker José Luis Aparicio.

According to its guidelines, "the exhibition favors audiovisuals with daring aesthetic and thematic proposals, as well as hybrid pieces that explore new paths in filmmaking”.

The concept guiding the current edition is the transnational nature of the New Cuban Cinema and its growing dialogue with diverse cinematographies, especially those of countries also ruled by authoritarian governments.

In addition to the CCCB in Barcelona, the venues for the screenings include the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa theater in the Spanish city. Other venues include the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires; the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City; Florida International University (FIU) in Miami; e-flux Screening Room in New York; the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris, and the Cinemateca Brasileira and Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC USP), in the Brazilian city.

The festival will have an international jury that will award the PM Nicolás Guillén Landrián Prize to the Cuban or non-Cuban film that best reflects a taboo subject. Its members are Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Brazilian critic and historian and one of the authorities on Latin American cinema; Dunja Fehimović, an academic specializing in Caribbean cinema and university professor in the United Kingdom; and Cuban screenwriter Alejandro Hernández, winner of the 2013 Goya Award for All Women, by Spanish filmmaker Mariano Barroso.

You can read the original note here

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IV INSTAR Film Festival: Aesthetic inventiveness and political critique on the transnational screen

By ÁNGEL PÉREZ – November 15th, 2023

RIALTA

Documentary 'Llamadas desde Moscú', by Luis Alejandro Yero (IMAGE YouTube / Costa Rica International Film Festival - trailer)

Taxibol (2023), by Italian director Tommaso Santambrogio, is one of the films in competition at the IV INSTAR Film Festival, whose program was in charge of Cuban director José Luis Aparicio. At a certain moment of this excellent medium-length film, during its first minutes, Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, who plays himself, comments to Gustavo Fleitas, the driver of the bus in which he travels the streets of the Cuban municipality of San Antonio de los Baños: "We have to push things forward to achieve the perfection of humanity [...] Humanity is now in an abyss of evils and turbulences. There are hotbeds of tension everywhere, war, terrorism, many disputes and dictators, and populist leaders [...] People must do things in their own way to fight against these evils". And immediately afterwards he states: "And cinema is part of that, of that cultural movement that fights against the problems of the world right now. Rather, cinema is the vanguard of these cultural movements. It is not art for art's sake. Fuck art for art's sake!".

This comment, as lapidary as it is eloquent, seems to be confirmed in INSTAR's competitive program. The fifteen audiovisual works competing this year, in a catalog that disregards genres, footage and nationalities, show that aesthetic inventiveness can be closely knotted with a firm political will; a stance interested in reading, questioning and intervening the discursive landscape of power, its strategies of control and its narratives. These films, in addition to being interesting filmic exercises, are an expression of struggles of interests, of the desire to make visible, in the midst of conflicts of subjectivation and domination, the fate of the individual besieged by history.

It should be noted that almost all the filmmakers included here have gone through, in one way or another, the experience of exile and, consequently, the political reactions and the affective dislocation that this condition can unleash become transparent as discursive subjects. With many of these filmmakers, in a way, something similar to what we hear the narrator of the documentary Ventanas say: "It has never happened to me to have my body in one place and my head seven thousand kilometers away". Not only the bulk of Cuban authors in the program live outside their country, but also Iranian Saleh Kashefi, director of the brief but forceful film essay And How Miserable is the Home of Evil (2023); Venezuelan Jhon Ciavaldini, creator of Ventanas (2022), and Costa Rican Gloria Carrion, creator of the moving exercise Hojas de K. (2022).

In particular, the conjunction of works by Cuban filmmakers is evidence of a creative community in the diaspora that has expanded in time and space; whose works, in addition to producing some of the most suggestive stylistic and thematic explorations of the moment, today give prestige to the cinema of our country in the most distinguished events in the world. The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry is a petrified institution; it no longer sets the tone of the Cuban audiovisual field. Determined to continue dissecting the country and its repetitions beyond the island, as well as themselves as territorialized subjects, Cuban filmmakers work from very different geographies: Emmanuel Martín from Canada; Daniela Muñoz and Carlos Melián from Spain; Eliecer Jiménez Almeida from the United States; Marcel Beltrán from Brazil...

But it is not only emigration or exile -experienced by the filmmakers or thematized in the films- that constitute the articulating factors of the group of competing works. These are perhaps the most obvious ones. The confrontation with dictatorial or totalitarian powers, as well as the discussion of the less happy profiles of their respective countries, marked by precariousness, violence and pain, characterize the discursive interests of these filmmakers.

For example, Mujeres que sueñan un país (Fernando Fraguela, 2023), Ventanas and Hojas de K present, through precise handling of archives and testimony, the emergence of new political subjects, a citizenship capable of facing government repression; Veritas (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2022) and Los puros (Carla Valdés León, 2021) delve into essential chapters of the Revolution's memory, in a frank dismantling of the control of historical narratives; Abisal (Alejandro Alonso, 2021) and El rodeo (Carlos Melián, 2022) expose individuals annulled by the discourse of History; Un homme sous son influence (Emmanuel Martín, 2023), La opción cero (Marcel Beltrán, 2020), and Llamadas desde Moscú (Luis Alejandro Yero, 2023) delve into the trauma of that emigration caused, at the same time, by ideological dissent, financial precariousness, and the impossibility of a future.

Also at the strictly expressive level, these works have significant points of contact. The work with the archive as a repository of memory, from which to deactivate the master narratives of power, links films like Mujeres que sueñan un país, And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil, Ventanas, and La opción cero. Testimony, as an instance capable of revealing the individual's subjection to a symbolic corpus (of affections, class, gender), also serves to destabilize official discourses in works like Los puros, Hojas de K, Llamadas desde Moscú, Veritas, Camino de lava, Mujeres que sueñan un país... The accentuation of the filmmaker's ego, as a filter for the documented realities, connects films like Mafifa, Los puros, Llamadas desde Moscú, Abisal, or Ventanas.

Poster of the IV INSTAR Film Festival (IMAGE Facebook / International Institute of Artivism "Hannah Arendt").

What exactly does Taxibol deliver? In black and white, the film presents two autonomous stories, intertwined in the discursive plane, in which the fictional register summons the crossing between the subject and History. Taxibol reflects on the survival of dictatorial/colonial powers as a cancer that corrodes the imaginary of a country. In the opening segment, after Lav Díaz and the driver recognize each other in a loquacious conversation (which flows regardless of their linguistic differences, as there are essentially human ties that bring them closer), the former confesses that he came to Cuba in search of Juan Mijares Cruz, once general of the Philippine dictator Ferdinando Marcos. Diaz tells the Cuban that, in addition to blowing his head off, he intends to make a documentary about the general to expose him: this is what happens in the second part. And that is exactly what the rest of the filmmakers included in the program do through their films. For the most part, these works are guillotines to cut off the king's head.

It is evident, for example, in And How Miserable is the Home of Evil. Its director, Saleh Kashefi, appropriated recordings of speeches by Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, archived on an official website, and intervened them with sound recordings of protests and public demonstrations. The result is a futuristic documentary that, in the aesthetic codes bequeathed by Peter Watkins, projects the imminent collapse of the Ayatollah under popular onslaught. Perhaps the most transgressive turn, in terms of representation, lies in the intervention/resignification of the image that power has drawn of itself.

And it is also evident in Hojas de K., where Carrión turns the testimonies of ten anonymous women, who in 2018 participated in the civic uprisings against the government of Daniel Ortega, into an animated story that shows the human rights violations and the repressive irrationality of the regime. The director turns animation into the ideal mechanism to give consistency to an experience (even a prison one) of which there are no records.

In the second segment of Taxibol, Santambrogio stages the general's daily life in a Cuban farm/mansion. Marcos' henchman survives there, protected by a government that allows him to stage the lost economy of control. Unlike the first segment, where the characters empathized, communicated, here everything is silence, distance, subordination. The general walks around his house like a corpse whose mere ghostly presence suggests control. In his estate all the maneuvers of totalitarianism are reproduced: Mijares watches through a telescope the routine of his workers; the living conditions of the boss are markedly humiliatingly unequal to those of his subordinates, who can barely walk in his room...

Towards the end of Taxibol, the Italian director interrupts the diegesis with archival color footage of civil protests and repression in the Philippines during the rule of Ferdinando Marcos. These recordings become a sort of materialization of the nightmares that assail the general every night. But they should not be read as an expression of guilt, but as a manifestation of his fear of historical revenge.

And there is historical vengeance, for example, in the documentary Veritas, which revisits a cardinal event in the evolution of the Cuban Revolution: "the Bay of Pigs invasion. Eliecer Jiménez Almeida explores the perspective of the events obliterated by the insular officialdom in its search for symbolic legitimacy. Members of Brigade 2506 take the floor in Veritas to testify, from their memories and above the political skein that involved the governments of Cuba, the Soviet Union and the United States, the nature of the events. Against the rationality of the official power, their allegations dismantle the label of "mercenary" with which their subjectivities were simplified; in a way, the voice of the exile is inserted in the post-1959 Cuban history, redirecting and complexifying its narration.

The obsession to rewrite the revolutionary memory from the voices of a wide diversity of subjects (ideological, gender, political, sexual...) occupies a good part of the films in competition. This is a trend that goes beyond the Latin American geography, and becomes especially important in those countries with totalitarian governments, engaged in controlling the collective memory and the political identities of individuals. Los puros, for example, revisits the weight in the present of the sovietization years in Cuba (1970s and 1980s) from the emotional cosmos of a group of friends trained at that time in universities in the USSR. That formative time impacted their sensibilities and forged their dreams of the future; however, the redirection of the island after the collapse of real socialism meant the annulment, to a large extent, of the spaces of recognition for their identities.

Mujeres que sueñan un país (Women who dream of a country) is about memory. Now, this documentary is so significant within the whole because it demonstrates the current impossibility of the political power to control the collective memory of the country. Hardly anything is known in Cuba about events such as the UMAP or the "Maleconazo"; there are hardly any archives of them. However, of the strike of the San Isidro Movement, the civic protests in front of the Ministry of Culture, or the social outburst of July 11, there are multiple records that citizens themselves uploaded to social networks at the time they were participating in history. Through the weaving of those records and the confessions of Daniela Rojo, Katherine Bisquet, and Anamely Ramos - subjectively connected by their ethical and ideological ties to the San Isidro strike - Mujeres que sueñan un país comes to say that a new political subject, another citizenship, is brewing in Cuba. Fraguela manages to inscribe the events of San Isidro as a determining point in the configuration of a truth opposed to power, while exposing its repressive nature.

Digital recordings, left by people in their social networks, integrate eloquent compilation exercises in the documentaries Ventanas and La opción cero. In Ventanas, as in Mujeres que sueñan un país, the filmmaker appropriates videos corresponding to citizen protests that occurred in Venezuela during 2017. Ciavaldini erects the story in the form of a dialogue with his mother (he lives in Argentina, she in Venezuela). The young man feels helpless at not being able to accompany this woman who is not afraid, rather needs, to take to the streets to show her dissent. At the same time, the conversations turn out to be a plea about repression, popular discontent with the government's management and citizens' resistance to police violence. La opción cero also uses these social media materials to articulate a reflection on the dangerous journey that thousands of Cubans ventured, and still venture, through the Darien jungle (Central America) in search of a better life in the United States. Almost at the beginning of the film, a person is heard saying in one of those videos: "Even if I have to go there, in that place, in that mountain, for a year, for however long it takes, but I'm not going there, not even if I'm crazy. Forget about it, it's crazy. I've spent a lot of work in Cuba". But perhaps the filmmaker's gesture is best appreciated in the fragment that contrasts recordings of a celebration of the Armed Forces Day at the Plaza de la Revolución with those of Cubans who have accepted death as their probable destiny rather than remain on the island. This political theater is very similar to that unveiled in Ventanas when images of Nicolás Maduro are inserted on national television.

Still from 'The Zero Option' (2020); Marcel Beltrán

Between the statement made by that person in The Zero Option and the question that the director of Ventanas asks himself ("Did leaving the country solve my problems or did it generate other problems that I didn't have before?"), the respective discourses of the documentary Llamadas desde Moscú and the fiction feature film Un homme sous son influence can be placed.

'Calls from Moscow' delves into the experience of emigration. Yero turns an apartment into a metaphor for the emotional and physical confinement of a group of young people in an expectant Moscow in the face of a war with unsuspected effects. The filmmaker converses with his characters until he realizes that the illusion of exile - typical of the Cuban imaginary of emigration - is often a fallacy. Emigration always promises an uncertain destiny. Their cuir bodies are the only home that these young men, whose subjectivities in crisis face an uncertain future, inhabit in freedom. Un homme sous son influence also presents a subjectivity in crisis, a conscience tormented by uncertainty. Emmanuel Martin himself assumes the representation of himself as an emigrant through a weaving of scenes tinged by the absurd, in which Romanian, Mexican, Indian and Cuban emigrants converge. United by existential dislocation, in a society that expels them to the margins, these characters live emigration as survival, as the dilation of a dream that never seems to come true. The story articulated by Martín is as schizoid as the voices of his protagonists, who seem to come out of an American indie production of the seventies; but therein lies the potential to illustrate the illusions of beings harassed by routine and labor exploitation. In both Llamadas desde Moscú and Un homme sous son influence there is no freedom, so longed for by the exiled subject; on the contrary, exile is restriction, oppression, death in life?

A similar perspective on immigration, but from the point of view of those who stay behind, is offered by the Haitian short film Agwe, by director Samuel Suffren. It tells the story of a family fractured by the imperative to leave the country in search of a better life, no matter the cost. Agwe is named after a deity of the sea in Haitian vodou; the protagonist makes an offering to her after waiting ten years for her husband, who left on a sailboat bound for the United States. Waiting, loneliness and uncertainty constitute the expressive core of a work where the image is enough to encrypt the historical breakdown of a culture, perhaps due to imperatives equivalent to those that push the Cubans presented in The Zero Option to risk their lives in the Darien jungle. In any case, the individuals present in both films, as in Los puros, Camino de lava, Abisal, Hojas de K., El rodeo... are now, in one way or another, subjects on the run, beings engaged in building their stories.

Popular religions and skin color as sources of identity, indexes of the subject's historical evolution, have an important place in the documentary Lava Road. Just as it is impossible to understand Agwe without looking at the history of Haiti and the current fate of its society, it is impossible to glimpse the discursive scope of Grethel Marín's film without a minimum idea of the place of the Afro-descendant subject in Cuban life. Camino de lava delves into the relationship of a black lesbian woman, Afibola, and her young son, Olurum. The testimonies of this woman - an Afro poet and cuir activist who participated in the construction of the script - present her concerns about her son's social place and his future. Her words sketch a family model capable of challenging the macho conservatism, racism and gender violence that plague "the outside" of Central Havana and the country as a whole. Streets and institutions are enclaves of segregation and violence; the home is a space of resistance that gives identity.

Mafifa explores a social habitat where (symbolic) violence, conditioning gender relationships, almost condemned Gladys Esther Linares to oblivion—the only woman who has integrated the mythical Conga de Los Hoyos in Santiago de Cuba. Daniela undertakes a documentary road movie to rescue Mafifa's memory while examining the singularity of a human and social environment: characters, houses, neighborhoods, and other spaces in the city, as well as celebrations, parties, and, in general, cultural practices that define and explain a way of existence. By investigating the universe of values around the bell-ringer, scrutinizing her traces in the memories of those who knew her, Muñoz Barroso also attempts to know herself a little more, and that premise orchestrates the original autoethnographic experience unfolded in the film, similar in certain aspects to what is shown in Ventanas.

Still from 'Mafifa' (2021); Daniela Muñoz Barroso

The two films that complete the competitive program of this IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival are the fiction short film El rodeo and the documentary essay Abisal. In their respective styles, the filmmakers evoke a subject detached from History, suspended in time, a residue of a time that is rapidly escaping. Although both films choose to install their narratives above contextual determinations, it is inevitable to find similarities with the exposure to the elements that the Cuban revolutionary project has become. The degree of stylization is what enhances the allegorical scope in each of these cinematic exercises.

The Rodeo places its narrative on an islet where a farewell takes place that has all the appearances of a religious ritual, staged in the form of a Cuban party. It is a definitive escape from reality. Melián does not seem to celebrate death as a triumph over a bleak reality or as a passage to happiness, but as the liberation of a subject disconnected from their time, to whom History does not offer footholds of recognition. Their dreams, expectations, their idea of personal fulfillment, have been ravaged by time, just like the artificial dam surrounding the islet covered "the little park where they met," the characters who are now bidding farewell. In the estranged atmosphere of El rodeo, death is a metaphor for the historical suspension of a generation of Cubans; just as experienced by the characters recorded by Alonso in Abisal. But the death of these characters is not a historical one, but existential; theirs are residual lives. Alonso immerses the viewer in a shipyard graveyard. Through meticulously composed photography, with expressionistic plasticity, he transfigures the shipyard into an image of present-day Cuba.

Still from 'El rodeo', Carlos Melián, dir., 2020.

The organizers of the event have stated that "the concept guiding this edition is the transnational character of the new Cuban cinema, as well as its growing dialogue with diverse cinematographies, especially those of countries also ruled by dictatorial or authoritarian governments". In this regard, the selection in competition could not be more eloquent.

With venues in Barcelona, Paris, New York, Miami, Mexico City, Buenos Aires or São Paulo, and with online transmissions for Cuba, the INSTAR Festival will be an unmissable event from December 4 to 10, 2023.

You can read the original note here

The IV INSTAR Film Festival, sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, will take place between December 4 and 10, organizers announced Friday. "In case of emergency, break the glass," warns the event's slogan this time. Read More »

The IV INSTAR Film Festival, the great transnational node of independent Cuban cinema, is coming soon

By RIALTA STAFF - november 10th, 2023

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Poster IV INSTAR Film Festival (IMAGE Courtesy of the organizers)

The IV INSTAR Film Festival, sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, will take place between December 4 and 10, organizers announced Friday. "In case of emergency, break the glass," warns the event's slogan this time.

With transnational headquarters spread across several cities in the world (Barcelona, Paris, New York, Miami, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo), the film festival has already established itself as a fundamental node in the field of independent Cuban cinema. At the same time, as in previous editions, its program expands to other creative geographies.

We identify as the beginning of this path the Cuban Cinema Under Censorship project, curated in 2018 by critic Dean Luis Reyes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in connection with a solo exhibition by Cuban artivist Tania Bruguera at that institution. Around that exhibition, a conversation took place between several Cuban filmmakers and cinephiles: Orlando Jimenez Leal, Miguel Coyula, Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti, and Eliecer Jimenez Almeida, as well as Reyes and Bruguera. In this dialogue, a need emerged: the creation of a support network from INSTAR.

As Bruguera, founder and director of the Institute, recalls in the introduction of this IV INSTAR Film Festival, the PM Awards, a fund to support the creation of short films, the post-production of feature films, and the distribution of finished works, with an emphasis on those hybrid pieces that de-territorialize the notion of cinema and explore new paths in its realization.

Subsequently, between 2019 and 2020, the Cine Independiente-Pendiente Showcase was organized, a monthly program curated by actress and writer Lynn Cruz. From that experience, the first edition of the INSTAR Film Festival was formalized at the end of 2020.

As the curator of that first edition, Cruz told Rialta News at the time: "Since Tania insisted that we could do something different, I proposed: Why don't we do something riskier? Why not an alternative film festival, especially now that Decree Law 373, at least apparently, indicates the government's willingness to legalize independent cinema? This also implies the emergence of autonomous spaces for cinema, as is the case of a festival. This should put an end to conflicts because what the official events reject would finally find its place. The underground has the right to exist. The big film institutions function as corporations. In the case of Cuba, it is known that, as in China, censorship extends beyond territorial borders. Anything that does not come with the approval of the ICAIC, in the case of filmmakers from the backyard, is received with suspicion. The obvious censorship generates sympathy, but there is one that operates silently, which occurs in the buffets or through phone calls. It is the one that makes it impossible to denounce but remains on the plane of subjectivity”.

A virtual edition would follow in December 2021 due to COVID-19, and by the summer of 2022, the festival was included in the activities of INSTAR at documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany. "Land Without Images”, as that last edition was titled, constituted -given the exhibition of 160 films- the largest retrospective of alternative Cuban cinema to date.

This year, the IV INSTAR Film Festival has been organized in a hybrid form. According to Bruguera, this happens due to “the massive exile of Cuban artists and intellectuals, among them the great majority of young active filmmakers we had worked with so far".

The screenings can be watched online from Cuba through the Festhome platform. "The concept that guides us," explains the performer, "is the transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema, as well as its growing dialogue with diverse cinematographies, especially those of countries also ruled by authoritarian governments, which impose strong censorship on artists."

A jury, consisting of Alejandro Hernández (Cuba), Dunja Fehimović (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and Paulo Antonio Paranaguá (Brazil), will award the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Prize "to the piece in competition that best reflects and explores, from audiovisual creation, some controversial topic of its corresponding society". According to the festival's presentation, "With this initiative, INSTAR intends to pay tribute to the relevant cinematographic work of Cuban documentary filmmaker and painter Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Camagüey, Cuba, 1938 - Florida, United States, 2003)".

Jose Luis Aparicio, artistic director of the last editions, stresses that this "is the first one conceived in exile"; this would explain "its lack of a center".

“Where do we set the headquarters of an event whose fundamental impulse has been the promotion and exhibition of Cuban independent cinema, when its homeland is inaccessible? How can we choose a point, fix an axis, among the multiple places of an ever-expanding diaspora? Isn’t the nation a more complex entity than the one defined by geographical limits and political extremes? How do we rethink the structure of the festival so that it reflects, and even improves, the current circumstances of the vast majority of the filmmakers it supports?” asks the young Cuban filmmaker, who lives in Spain, like many of his colleagues and generation mates.

Perhaps some of these questions will be answered through the screening of the 15 films in competition and 13 other special presentations. "From INSTAR," says Aparicio, "we want to disseminate news seeds, to seize all that could be fertile and liberating in a highly fragmented cultural landscape. The status of exiled filmmakers, artists, and citizens that millions of Cubans bear today presents a conflict that must be addressed through persistent imagination. We aim to create a corridor of images between several isolated points of our dispersed nation. Perhaps, through this imaginary network, it will be possible to reconnect with the island, with the diverse and complex versions of the country that we find in its cinema.”

INSTAR -and its film festival- aspires to be, says Bruguera, "where ideas become civic actions.”

You can read the original note here

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Six independent Cuban film projects receive the PM Awards 2023 of the International Institute of Artivism “Hannah Arendt”

By RIALTA STAFF - October 27th, 2023

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Detail of the poster (at the PM Awards) of the project "History is Written at Night", by Alejandro Alonso (IMAGE Facebook/International Institute of Artivism "Hannah Arendt").

The PM Awards 2023, presented by the International Institute of Artivism "Hannah Arendt" (INSTAR), honored six Cuban audiovisual projects across three categories –post-production of short and feature films, and distribution– from a pool of 34 submissions.

This was announced on social media by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, the visible head of INSTAR, who pointed out that participation in this edition more than doubled that of previous years.

The jury, Venezuelan visual artist and activist Javier Tellez, Cuban filmmaker Rafael Ramirez, and his Nicaraguan colleague Gloria Carrion, unanimously decided to award the following projects in the short film production category (20 entries), with a five thousand dollar prize for each: " History is Written at Night", by Alejandro Alonso, and "The Dam", by Manuel Ojeda.

In the feature film post-production category, which provides seven thousand dollars in each case, 'Family in Motion', by Aminta de Cárdenas and Helman Avelle, as well as "'Cuba and the Night', by Sergio Fernández Borrás, were selected.

The distribution fund (1,500 dollars) will support 'The Blame Was on the Salamander', by Yary Guirado, and 'Souvenir', by Heidi Hassan.

Beyond the Cuban filmmakers' recognition of the fund provided by INSTAR, Bruguera said, the growing participation in this call for the PM Awards " underlines the importance of expanding [the] support for their work, on many occasions carried out in conditions of extreme precariousness and without institutional support from their home country."

"It also demonstrates the perseverance of these artists to continue creating, amid difficulties, whether inside Cuba or in any corner of exile," added the renowned Cuban performer. "We are committed to creating new opportunities and spaces for Cuban filmmakers and their films."

For their part, the members of the jury defined these awards as "a fundamental tool for the creation of a plural Cuban cinema capable of dialoguing with other cinematographic manifestations at a global level.

In the opinion of the evaluators, most of the competing proposals "stand out for their diversity, artistic and cinematographic quality, as well as for the complexity of their reflections on the political and social context". They also said they "demonstrate the resilience, creativity, and dynamism of Cuban filmmakers.

 "The relevance of their messages and the originality of their cinematic approaches reflect a community of artists deeply committed to telling their stories despite the challenges some of them face, such as exile, political persecution, and state repression," the jury's minutes finally state.

Additionally, Rafael Ramírez committed to consulting on the project 'The Philosophers', by Dayán Noa, while Gloria Carrión will do the same for three film projects: 'Family, Island', by Abraham Jiménez and Claudia Calviño; 'Rancor', by Carlos Alejandro Halley, and 'Anthropocene', by Marcos A. Iglesias Ravelo.

You can read the original note here

Seis proyectos Read More »

Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism invites to its IV Film Festival: an independent commitment to aesthetic daring and generic hybridity

Por RIALTA STAFF – 20 noviembre, 2023

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Póster (detalle) del IV Festival de Cine INSTAR, a celebrarse del 4 al 10 de diciembre de 2023 (IMAGEN instar.org)

El cine independiente, y especialmente el cubano, volverá a tener un espacio múltiple, vanguardista entre el 4 y el 10 de diciembre de este año, cuando se celebre el The IV INSTAR Film Festival, sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, will take place between December 4 and 10, organizers announced Friday. "In case of emergency, break the glass," warns the event's slogan this time., auspiciado anualmente por el Instituto de Artivismo “Hannah Arendt”. Este 26 de junio, esa organización de la sociedad civil cubana liberó una convocatoria en que privilegia “audiovisuales con arriesgadas propuestas estéticas y narrativas, así como piezas híbridas que exploran nuevos caminos en la realización”.

La muestra fílmica –que, de acuerdo con los organizadores, “tendrá lugar simultáneamente en varias sedes alrededor del mundo”– está abierta a obras finalizadas entre 2021 y 2023; asimismo, se advierte que podrán inscribirse películas “de cualquier nacionalidad, extensión, género y formato”.

“Cada autor podrá presentar cuantas obras estime pertinentes”, especifica también INSTAR. “Se establecerá una sección competitiva única, donde coexistirán largos, medios y cortometrajes, sin restricción de género. También se incluirán obras de cine expandido, cine experimental y del campo de las artes visuales”.

La admisión tiene como deadline el 5 de septiembre próximo; en tanto, la selección oficial y las nóminas correspondientes a muestras colaterales se darán a conocer el 30 de octubre a través de la web y las redes sociales de INSTAR.

“El hecho de que exista el oasis de INSTAR, no solo respecto al cine, sino en relación con toda la cultura cubana alternativa, es una suerte y dice mucho del trabajo incansable que hacen [la fundadora y directora] Tania Bruguera y su equipo”, comentaban hace ya un par de años a Rialta Noticias los curadores de esta muestra. “El Festival de Cine INSTAR brinda un espacio al cine cubano; un cine que ha quedado un poco huérfano en los últimos años, que ha sido bastante maltratado por las instituciones oficiales, con importantes sucesos de censura y marginación. En tanto cineastas no nos sentimos protegidos ni respaldados por los funcionarios culturales de las instituciones que deberían responder a nuestras inquietudes.

La convocatoria del IV Festival de Cine INSTAR llega algunas semanas después del cierre de las inscripciones para los Premios PM, que se conocerán en octubre venidero y que también son presentado por INSTAR, con periodicidad anual, como “un impulso a la producción audiovisual independiente tanto en la isla como en su diáspora”.

En el caso de esta última, se trata de una oportunidad para “directores y productores cubanos” en busca de apoyo a la producción de cortos, la post-producción de largometrajes o la distribución de una obra terminada, en especial aquellas consideradas “piezas híbridas o de frontera que exploren nuevos caminos en la realización”.

You can read the original note here

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The propitious rebellions of Miñuca & Fernando Villaverde

By ÁNGEL PÉREZ – November 27th, 2023

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Still from 'Elena' (ICAIC; 1964), a fiction short film starring Miñuca Villaverde and directed by Fernando Villaverde (IMAGEN Rialta / Cine Cubano en Cuarentena).

1.

Thanks to the efforts of  Néstor Díaz de Villegas, two films by Fernando Villaverde made in Cuba during his days at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) are now known, after several decades condemned to oblivion. The works are the documentary The Park (1963) and the short fiction film Elena (1965). The latter was originally conceived to compose the frustrated feature film A little more Blue which would complete two other stories: ‘The Encounter’, directed by Manuel Octavio Gómez, and ‘The End’, by Fausto Canel. Only ‘The Encounter’ made it to theaters. Neither Elena nor ‘The End’ escaped unscathed from the strict ethical and political surveillance of the revolutionary power over artistic production. Elena did not convince the authorities, as it did not agree with the demands of the historical narrative demanded by the Revolution. The ideological disagreements between Villaverde and the authorities began earlier, with ‘The Park’, accused of harboring an atmosphere of pessimism that diverged from the triumphalist mood of the times and continued afterward.

Produced in 1963, at the height of the revolutionary epic, ‘The Park’ is far from the euphoric spirit that was supposed to permeate the art of the time. Its composition shows characteristics typical of the experimentation climate of those days, but it does not conceal its gaze towards a sometimes melancholic zone of social experience. While the streets preferred to be plethoric in the manner of ‘General Assembly’ (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1961), Fernando Villaverde decided to record a social profile where light gives way to gloom. This tension between recording Havana's Central Park, a social accident expected to be effusive, and the atmosphere of sadness that pervades almost through the entire film made it uncomfortable for some indoctrinated minds.

The most recent readings of the works of directors such as Sara Gómez and Nicolás Guillén Landrián, reveal a critical vocation toward the Revolutionary project, the supposed effectiveness of its mechanisms of modernization, and the creation of the "New Man". Unlike these directors, who inscribe the revolutionary process in their works, ‘The Park’ does not even include it thematically. Although there is no evident criticism or questioning on the surface of its images, its register seems to disregard that confidence in the transformation of the world promised by the Revolution. Even if we take into account Fernando Villaverde's own statements about his resentment, already at that time, about the political course of the country, it is striking that the film ignores the time of the Revolution and only looks at the time of old age, the time of beings who see death approaching.

Although the documentary consists of exploring a day in Havana's Central Park, its discourse transcends that immediate motivation. ‘The Park’ begins with the phrase: "I will never live to be a man's age; as a child, I will become an old man", and it runs through the habitus recorded, explaining the dynamics and routines captured by the film: the climate/rhythm that emanates perhaps from the elderly, retired, stray old people who spend their days there. The images chosen to draw the park, in contrast with the words of the voice that narrates, articulate a plea about the irreversibility of time, nostalgia, and longing for days gone by. Those old people who come to the park perhaps live without too much exaltation about those days, indifferent to the martial euphoria of a group of pioneers who burst in at some point.

Still from ʽEl parqueʼ, Fernando Villaverde, dir., 1963.

But this documentary is especially disturbing when the narrator's voice intervenes and we hear her nostalgic evocations with no apparent relation to the recorded environment; when the mournful music ceases to let in an unhinged voice which, while the camera contemplates the treetops, is heard to say in a broken voice: "I speak of God", or: "the fever will finish us off”. And, above all, when we notice the absolute disregard for the statue of José Martí installed on the site. It is not the time of History that matters, but "human time": the time of those old people who make Central Park their world.

‘Elena’ was also uncomfortable because it was born from that impulse that preferred to contemplate reality from a lateral perspective, different from the one privileged by power. In a beautiful photographic and editing exercise that eloquently subscribes to the codes of the Nouvelle Vague -an early demonstration of the false regency of Italian neorealism- 'Elena' narrates the movements of a young woman of the same name in Havana in 1957, as she tries to say goodbye to her partner, an underground fighter in exile in the Venezuelan embassy, who has to leave the country. Contrary to what might be expected, there is no heroic look in this film (neither in the story, nor in the design of the characters, nor in the atmosphere of the narration). Elena's pre-revolutionary Havana is very different from the clandestine Havana of El herido, the first story of 'Stories of the Revolution' (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1959). Here we do not breathe the climate of the internal struggle that was being waged at the time; we enter a city tailored to Elena's needs. It is not the subjectivity of the revolutionary man that filters the narration, but that of his girlfriend, a girl quite indifferent to that struggle. There is a scene in which Elena asks a girl outside the Venezuelan embassy: "Are you a revolutionary?", and she hears the answer: "A little, and you? Elena fixes the scarf on her head, looks away, and never answers. That question will be asked again, directed to Sergio, by the Elena of 'Memories of Underdevelopment' (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968), and well seen: the Elena of Villaverde is a little bit the Elena that seduces the protagonist of Titón.

Two moments are particularly revealing in this short film. The one where the shot opens up to show the film set, in a Brechtian twist of distancing that allows the protagonist to tell the viewer how her days to come and the reunion with Octavio will unfold. And the final sequence where the young woman meets Octavio's friend, to whom she was to give an errand; she is seen flirtatiously and smiling in his car until the end of the film, in an ambiguous and suggestive shot where she leaves the frame in his direction to light a cigarette. If the first shows the absolute contemporaneity of Villaverde's creative sensibility, the second confirms his interest in those subjectivities external to the revolutionary event: in this case, a young woman eager to see her boyfriend for the last time, determined in her sensuality and ease.

Still, despite these political disagreements, Fernando Villaverde would direct yet another cursed film in Cuba: 'The Sea', his first fiction feature film. A film of which, unfortunately, no copy has been preserved and which is perhaps among the many reels that seem doomed to disappear in the ICAIC archive -and with them, an invaluable part of the national aesthetic heritage and memory. 'The Sea' suffered a worse fate than Elena! And that was the definitive confirmation for Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde: there was no possible communion between their thoughts and the ideology that ruled creation on the island. Faced with such a reality, as so many artists did then, and for similar reasons, they went into exile.

Until today, we only know the plot of 'The Sea' written between Fernando and Miñuca Naredo, his partner and collaborator, also a director, who, at that time, still signed with her maiden name. Miñuca had previously worked with Fernando on the text and narration of 'The Park' as well as on the screenplay of Elena, in which she also played the lead role.

But the cinematographic productivity of Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde would not cease with their departure from the country; from then on, they would consolidate a creative team whose works are still waiting to be rigorously attended to.

Elena on the iron bridge of Linea. Still from 'Elena' (1964), a film by Fernando Villaverde.

2.

Once out of Cuba, a creative period began for both of them amidst new production circumstances, with different work media, stimulated by other realities and also motivated by other stylistic currents. Between 1970 -the year in which that exercise of documentary experimentation titled 'Apollo: Man to The Moon' is dated- and 1980 -the date in which Miñuca made 'Tent City' an inescapable archive about the migratory event of Mariel, a film with which they put an end to their cinematographic work-, a group of singular works appears, experimental pieces undertaken by two transgressive and avant-garde minds whose vitality reaches our present.

The exile works of Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde are significant accidents of the Cuban cinema of the diaspora, of the cinema left by that first exodus of filmmakers who broke with the regime during the first decades of the Revolution. The films produced by these authors confronted the official historical narrative and made visible the problems and subjectivity of Cubans living outside the island. But even within this specific landscape, the films by Miñuca and Fernando Villaverde are undoubtedly an exception, mainly because of their experimentation with the cinematographic form.

The films they made in exile throughout the 70s are impregnated with the spirit of aesthetic rebellion of the New American Cinema that Jonas Mekas defended/promoted so much, and with the whole artistic universe of the New York underground scene. These audiovisuals have an experimental vocation that brings them seductively close to the realms of video art and performative cinema; works that possess a politics of representation of the body and intimacy that, intrinsic to the work of the creators of that movement, would considerably influence contemporary cinema.

Settled in New York, in contact with the independent scene of the city, Miñuca and Fernando Villaverde begin to record with a 16mm Bolex camera the daily life of the big city, and their days in it. They undertake those records, as 'Apollo: Man to the Moon shows', with disdain for "the perfection of the industry" promulgated by Mekas. 'Apollo...', a sort of New York newspaper, uses the radio news generated around man's first trip to the moon, in mid-1969, to vertebrate a wide diversity of images that reflect the city dynamics and climate of those days. The voice-over ties together a series of urban images and endows them with a sometimes futuristic atmosphere. Different layers of the city -its architectural outline, its technological status, its multicultural human flow...- are compiled with absolute formal freedom. This is where the notion of recording everyday life as a strategy for humanizing the human experience as opposed to Hollywood's own prefabrication is already apparent.

The beginnings of the New York movement are felt in all their radicalism in this excellent work of fiction titled 'A Lady's Home Journal'. We enter a dreamlike atmosphere, surrealist in the style of 'An Andalusian Dog' that weaves the routines of a woman in her home and her dreams of escape from that reality. 'A Lady's Home Journal' is a work of staging and editing as sensual, erotic, and disturbing as the character played in it by Miñuca. This film exhibits, in its entirety, the type of performative writing defended by the independents, aimed at trying out other ways of dialoguing with reality and subjects that did not have to pact with the standard narrative molds. The density of readings on the female body and the culturally constructed identity of women -supported by an image as beautiful as it is hallucinated- guarantee the actuality of the aesthetic proposals of the piece.

As a director, Miñuca Villaverde delivers a film as suggestive for Cuban cinema as 'To My Father': a sort of video letter that pays tribute to the memory of her father, who died in Texas in 1972. The film is a sensitive portrait of the family as homeland. The shots of the children playing in the yard, of the empty rooms where the human footprint can be perceived, of the people undertaking any domestic routine, but above all, of the already ailing body of the father, depict a sentimental communion, and a home portrait where the pain of loss is intertwined with the joy of remembrance. The human experience apprehended in the intimacy of the house, tinged by the bolero 'Veinte años', irremediably refers to the experience of exile. It is no coincidence that Miñuca opens the film with a photo of her and her father in Havana in 1954. Memory and family come together to reveal a very personal corner of the filmmaker's self -a somewhat wandering self, perhaps, that still travels to who knows where, through that endless road that does not seem to end in the final shot of the film-, and they also come together because, in that corner of memory, there is room for happiness.

 

Miñuca Villaverde, circa 1964

If Miñuca Villaverde displayed her experimental vocation in one film, it was 'Poor Cinderella, Still Ironing Her Husband Shirt': a feverish visual and representational essay on women and the female body just a few seconds away from video art. A series of negative images, cuttings from another of her films - 'Blanca Putica, a Girl in Love' (1973), not included in the showcase organized by INSTAR, just like Love Will Never Come (1977) - and scratched celluloid, allow the filmmaker to craft a reflection on the objectification of women by the male gaze and their sexual relegation by cultural apprenticeship.

Perhaps she did not work with such a purpose, and just wanted to deliver the excellent plastic exercise that the film also is; in her work with lights, texture, color, the changing rhythm of the and montage, a seductive aesthetic experience is created. But even from the title itself, the senses detached from the looped images are accentuated: a naked female body being taken over and over again to bed to be possessed by a male body. These images, in contrast with the face of a woman (represented by Miñuca herself), invite us to think about the subjective emptying of women's erotic pleasure. In Poor Cinderella..., the cinematographic writing is the body, and the body is a curse, pleasure, joy, and conquest.

After leaving New York and settling in Miami, she directed 'Tent City'; according to Carlos A. Aguilera, "the best thing that has been done about the trauma or fracture known as Mariel". The documentary is a testimony of the artist whose words are as important as the record of the Mariel refugee camp installed "under the I 95 highway that runs from north to south of the United States, right where Little Havana ends," the filmmaker confessed in an interview with Aguilera. Undertaken with the same freedom explored in her New York films, 'Tent City' is a valuable historical document about the exodus, the confusion and uncertainty of the future experienced by those people, and, of course, the early failure of the Revolution's developmentalist discourse.

In the form of reportage, at times a home movie, this documentary captures the gaze of faces marked by history for posterity. The sense of freedom experienced by these subjects overflows the precariousness of their living conditions in that place. Miñuca Villaverde herself emphasizes in her narration: "Although the tents are surrounded by a metal fence, they feel free for the first time in many years". The queer bodies, which continually take over the camera -without hiding their identities, quite the contrary-, are the best example of how these people from 'Tent City', recently arrived in a geography and culture different from their own, now seem determined to finally express their individualities without restrictions.

Fotograma de ‘Tent City’ (1980); Miñuca Villaverde (IMAGEN Vimeo / Vía: rialta.org)

3.

In honor of Miñuca and Fernando Villaverde, the INSTAR Film Festival will present a selection of their works during its fourth edition. The event's Special Presentations program will bring to its various venues the films 'To My Father' (1973),

'Poor Cinderella, Still Ironing Her Husband Shirt' (1978) and 'Tent City' (1980), by Miñuca and Apollo: Man to The Moon and A Lady's Home Journal (1972), by Fernando. In addition to a well-deserved act of homage, the exhibition of these materials answers one of the questions that, according to José Luis Aparicio, the curator of the event, motivated the curatorship: "Isn't the nation a more complex entity than the one demarcated by geographic limits and political extremes?" The invitation to enjoy and think about the audiovisual work of these artists is perfectly in tune with the Festival's purpose of "creating a corridor of images between several of the isolated points of our national dispersion", since, the young Cuban filmmaker pointed out, "perhaps from this imaginary network we can connect again with the island, with the diverse and complex versions of the country we find in its cinema".

With 'Tent City', as I said at the beginning, Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde end their film career. She confesses: "I'm retiring from it, exhausted of not having the means or the environment in Miami to continue making films". Reinserted into the Cuban film scene due to the attention they have been receiving in recent years, and although still barely shown on the island's screens, these films are beginning to arouse new and substantial readings. One thing is evident: the work of this creative couple still seems to us as avant-garde as when it was filmed.

Miñuca & Fernando Villaverde, circa 1964

You can read the original note here

Las próvidas rebeliones Read More »

Emmanuel Martín, Cuban filmmaker: "'A Man Under the Influence' saved my life".

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS - November 26th, 2023

RIALTA

Filming of ‛'A Man under his Influence''; Emmanuel Martín (PHOTO Courtesy of the filmmaker).

For the second time, I interviewed Emmanuel Martín. Perhaps the first interview didn't even happen. We were face to face at the headquarters of a Young Filmmaker Showcase, which no longer exists, and the interview was for a disappeared publication in a pre-COVID, pre-economic reordering, and pre-Inflation Cuba that no longer exists either. The filmmaker has left Cuba; he emigrated to Canada.

On this occasion, we communicated via WhatsApp, with the pretext of his second feature film, ‘'A Man under His Influence' (2023), which will have its world premiere at the IV INSTAR Festival, an event also diasporic, it comes from everywhere and goes everywhere, and helps Cuba expand beyond physical borders unbearable or impossible for many.

‘A Man under His Influence’ will be available for Cuban audiences on the Festhome platform from December 4 to 10, from 10:00 a.m. to midnight. The Mexican venue of the INSTAR Film Festival, the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in the capital, will show the film on December 5, 6, and 7, while the Centro Cultural General San Martín, in Buenos Aires, has scheduled its screening on December 6.

I watched the film thanks to a private Vimeo link that the filmmaker sent me. Borders are increasingly illusory, and Cuban Cinema is increasingly becoming one, even if filmed at the North Pole, even if reactionary forces persist in separating its most important contemporary portion from the audiovisual body of the nation. Emmanuel Martin answers the questions through audio recordings he takes during a subway ride through the hollows of Montreal. He is looking for new rent; I'm looking to stay sane through the crazy things I can talk with him, for Rialta News. Rialta Noticias.

Poster of ‛'A Man under his Influence''; Emmanuel Martín (IMAGE Courtesy of the filmmaker).

‘A Man Under His Influence’ is your first film made outside Cuba. Therapy, catharsis, or chronicle of an emigrant?

In a recent interview with José Luis Aparicio, I said this is my favorite film I’ve done. Directors always fall into that cliché. For example, I read in an interview with Scorsese that he considers 'Silence' as his best film. And Tarantino, in recent interviews, has said that "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" is his best film. Maybe it's a marketing campaign, but, in my case, it's not, because I know my film is not going to sell.

This film literally saved my life. I had been living, working, coming home, working, coming home, waiting for my papers, for my political refugee hearing, and missing my son, and it was not a very good psychological process. I was not feeling well.

So I decided that I couldn't go on like this. That I was going to go mad. Even though I was living well because you live well in Montreal, I love this city. Even if sometimes I have a lot of "downs" and sometimes I get angry, I love this city very much. I chose it to live in. I lived in Toronto before, and I left because I didn't like it. I lived on Vancouver Island; it was a very beautiful natural area. Then I came to Montreal, and I really love it. Human beings are not safe anywhere, but I love this city.

Still from ‛'A Man under his Influence''; Emmanuel Martín (IMAGE Courtesy of the filmmaker).
Still from ‛'A Man under his Influence''; Emmanuel Martín (IMAGE Courtesy of the filmmaker).

Still, I didn't feel good. As an undocumented immigrant, I couldn't apply for any funding, even though there are many ways to get funds for films in Canada. So I decided I wanted to shoot it now. I bought the technical equipment: cameras, lights, and sound, and started contacting people.

Of course, the film is the chronicle of an immigrant! Not just one but all the immigrants who work in the movie. Look, if many actresses wanted to work for free, it was because, regardless of how talented they are, being an actor in the industry is very difficult. The industry is cruel and demands a specific accent, a certain somatotype of race and color.

The industry is cruel with accents, and so many of these actresses who worked with me, even if they are very good, can't find a place in the industry. They can't break into the Canadian industry, whether Quebecois or English-speaking. Even if they "crush" English or French, they don't speak with the accent the television or film industry requires. Film is a "give and take" thing. An actor receives but is giving something back.

That's why, Tony, regardless of all the reviews you might want to write or that any friend might write, or the fact they want to show it at INSTAR, my dream is to show this film here in Montreal. I owe that to my actors and actresses. Actors need to see themselves on a movie screen. Opening night is very important. They don't want to see the film on YouTube and share a link with anyone. Actors want to see their movies in the theater on gala night. Every actor and every musician wants to do that: showcase their work in front of an audience, not showcase it in secret. This is a performing art. Audiovisual, but also scenic. I owe that to my actors. link a nadie. Los actores quieren ver su película en el cine en la noche de gala. Todo actor y todo músico quieren hacer eso: exhibir su obra ante el público; no exhibirla escondido. Esto es un arte escénico. Audiovisual, pero también escénico. Les debo eso a mis actores.

I often feel angry because I have not been able to exhibit it in Montreal at the big festivals held here. And that's what I'm struggling with. If it's shown in Mexico, fine; if it's shown in Argentina, okay; if it's shown in Cuba, also; but where I really want to screen it is here, in its home country.

Still from ‛'A Man under his Influence''; Emmanuel Martín (IMAGE Courtesy of the filmmaker).

How did defining processes for a film, like pre-production and casting, go?

I created a new Facebook account because my old one was hacked, and I started searching through groups like ‘Montreal Filmmakers’, ‘Montreal Artist’, ‘Montreal Underground’... all of those. And I found Mike Som. I always say he's the soul of this film. A beautiful person. He's Cambodian-Congolese. I explained my situation to him. I said, "Man, I don't feel good; I need to make this film to feel better, blah, blah, blah. I come from Cuba; I'm a filmmaker," and he said, "Don't worry. I'll come to your house and bring some beers after work, and we'll talk". Then he brought a videographer, and told me: "I'm going to help you". And that was it.

We prepared the first shoot. So you see, it was the scene with the Tamil Indians from South India, which is where Sadguruh comes from, and also Visvanātaṉ Āṉant, former world chess champion. I rehearsed a lot with them. One was my roommate, Bharath; the others were his friends. They are all computer scientists.

We rehearsed for about a week to be able to do the scene. They had never worked on a movie before. Mike Som came, the photographer came and brought other friends. Mike did the sound. Paula, a Cuban film student - daughter of Otto and Tamara, two santiagueros I had met a few months earlier - came as assistant director. And we finished it.

Then, I began posting on social media that we had started shooting. Even though I still didn't have a leading actress. I contacted several actresses through social media. Many of them said no until one accepted, and we met. Then we did a shoot with the first "Nicole".

I had worked in a music video as an actor a year before. I met many actresses there, including the Mexican Myriam Lopez, also a beautiful person, who plays the character of Alexandra. I contacted her, and she helped me. Myriam referred me to the Chilean Camilla Purdy, who plays the "Nicole" of the bridge and cafe scenes. They were co-workers. Camilla recommended me to Umar Chaudhry, whom I have become close friends with. His dad is from Pakistan, and his mom is from Jamaica. He helped me a lot. At his parents' house, we shot the scenes at the gym and the scenes in which we left the restaurant where the characters work, and have a conversation.

Very beautiful people joined the film. They were all willing to work for free. I had already done that in Santiago de Cuba. I had convinced a lot of people to work for free. Maybe it may sound egotistical, but as I come from a black family and a white family, I lived in the suburbs but was also an athlete. I can deal with human beings, with their differences and their madness, with criminals, with intelligent people, with blacks, with whites. I think this is my greatest talent as a filmmaker: I can deal with human beings, look them straight in the eye, and tell them what I need. They sense my sincerity and maybe pity me; I don't know.

That's really what 'A Man Under the Influence' is: a film that saved my life. More than for artistic ego, I needed to make it. I feel much better now. Of course, it has left me in debt. I had seven thousand dollars in my bank account, and it all went on the film. I've had to pay the entry fees to festivals. I'm still working, and, little by little, I'm recovering financially, but it's my family's money, for my wife and son. I leaped into the void, and I still haven't fully recovered.

Still from ‛'A Man under his Influence''; Emmanuel Martín (IMAGE Courtesy of the filmmaker).

How underground and how independent is A Man under His Influence?

I was talking about what an immigrant suffers, not only as working class but also as artists. It is difficult for an immigrant actor to integrate. I have the impression that today it is much harder than before. In those films of the sixties, seventies, and early eighties that were shot in Europe, in those co-productions that were made between Italy, France, England -sometimes Germany came in, you saw actors of different nationalities. For example, in ‘For a Few Dollars More’, Leone's third film, you have Kinski who is German, Volonté who is Italian, and you have Clint Eastwood who is American. And they were actors who spoke with different accents. It was allowed. It was super crazy stuff. That was one of the most beautiful and tolerant times in the history of cinema in terms of diversity and creativity.

In a recent conversation, you told me that ‘A Man Under His Influence’ is "not Cuban". Do you consider it to be Canadian, global, or extraterrestrial?

I am Cuban, and Lester Harbert Noguel, one of the actors in the film, is Cuban and plays a Cuban. There is a strong Cuban element in the piece, of course, there is. There are conversations about Cuba and the issue of Cuban migrants. But, when I shot it, I wanted it to be part of Montreal, part of its history, part of its independent cinema. I want it to be exhibited as a Montreal, Quebec film, but the two most important festivals in Quebec have rejected it.

I was telling Aparicio that the film director has to have pride. It's not a matter of arrogance but pride because it's very easy to throw the towel. There’s always that option. Everything in life leads you to stop making films; then, when the city where you shot the film rejects you, you have to say: "Fuck you, you know what: if you don't love me, I'm not going to love you either". And have high self-esteem, which is not the same as being arrogant. It's important to be confident about what you're doing and, if the film doesn't fit in Montreal, you find another port. I've seen a lot of talented people in this world throw in the towel, but I will never do that.

I think I told you in an interview that, if I ever left the country, I wanted to continue making films, that I couldn't see myself doing anything else. I was thinking that life is greater than anyone's desires.

Life always gives me lessons in humility. Let's talk about humility now. Life has things in store for you that you don't expect. I've had to do a lot of jobs, some of the ugliest jobs there have ever been. I've been in factories and seen how ruthless they are. I worked in one once, outside of Montreal. I really liked it because as soon as we got there the people from Quebec themselves told us, "Welcome, we need you." They were white, from right there. It's a meat packing plant; I worked in the cold. They respected the break and lunch times. By law, in Canada, when you have an eight-hour day, the company must give you two fifteen-minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, paid. You get a half-hour lunch break, but it is not paid.

I have been in other factories that only give lunch breaks and don’t pay for them. It's a terrible violation of workers' rights. I've lived it. I was working there. There is labor abuse. They take advantage of the immigrants who arrive poor and without money. Some are very decent and respect that, and they don't push you around, they don't harass you. I was telling Aparicio that, if my film was fighting for something, it was for the immigrant working class, because it is not the same to be a worker born here as being an immigrant.

I have always considered you an outsider  in Cuba. How do you see yourself in Canada?

I never felt like an outsider in Cuba. Aparicio used to ask me why we stayed in Santiago, Carlitos [Melián], José Armando [Estrada], and me. It wasn't a matter of rebellion: Santiago is a big city. Cuba is a totally impoverished country now, but Santiago has it all as a city. It has beaches, it's multicultural, it has a cool bohemian scene, it has cafes. We really felt good in Santiago, we felt comfortable. We weren't staying out of rebellion.

In Santiago de Cuba we had our friends, our homes; we controlled the locations, we could shoot wherever we wanted: in a church, a bank, or a train station. We were known there. I don't think it was defiance; I haven't considered myself a rebel within the Cuban audiovisual industry. Of course, I would have liked my previous film, 'Chess Stories', to have had a better run. Everyone wants to exhibit their work; it's not a problem of arrogance, greed, or ambition. It's what it takes.

Scorsese has been promoting his latest film, The Killers of the Flower Moon, to get people to return to the cinema. And it's true. I saw it in the theater. It's the only one of his films I've seen in the theater. And it's wonderful, brother. The sound, the way it's constructed, the images, the timing. The film is very long, but you don't feel it. If I had been home, maybe I would have been bored, but in the cinema you enjoy it. I remember watching films at film festivals in Havana; I remembered watching ‘Inland Empire’, also a three-hour picture. It was ten o'clock in the morning, at the Riviera cinema, with my girlfriend. It was a delight. Cinema should be seen at the theater; it's how it's meant to be. That's what I wanted to happen with 'Chess Stories’.

Some institutions would have handled it better; for example, the ICAIC [Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry], whose job it is. Sometimes, when filmmakers complain about the ICAIC, it's not because we want something from them, but because it's the only institution we have, and it should do its job. But in Cuba, officials and institutions behave as if we were asking for charity. And it is not like that. They have to do their job.

Here, in a democracy, politicians are expected to. Journalists question what politicians say all the time. So does the opposition. Although it is true that there are only two parties and that almost always the same politicians are in the same circuit for years -one leaves the presidency but stays in an important ministerial post–, despite that, they know that they are watched all the time. They have to answer to the citizens because that is where their salaries come from.

But not in Cuba. Institutions and officials act as if we owe them something, when in fact, the little that the ICAIC or the Ministry of Culture may have is thanks to us Cubans. Whether it is the money that comes from remittances, from tourism... But who integrates the workforce of tourism: the Cubans. In the end, it is not the people who owe the politicians but the politicians who owe the people.

But in Cuba, we are threatened all the time. The function of the ICAIC should at least be the distribution of Cuban films. If they don't have money, which is the same nonsense we always hear, they should at least make an effort to distribute the two or three Cuban feature films that are shot every year.

How many feature films were made in the same year as ‘Chess Stories’? About four. Agosto by Armando Capó, Las campañas de invierno by Rafael Ramírez, and mine... And the ICAIC doesn't take care of them, brother. It doesn't care about sending those films to different festivals around the world, not even that which only takes an e-mail. In Cuba, there is still a lot of dirty laundry to wash. That's why my expectations are with Montreal and Canada. It's something I can and feel I can fix and improve. In Cuba, I felt like I was sailing against nothing, brother, and it was not the fault of any artist, colleague, or anything like that... It is difficult to sail against the current in Cuba, very difficult. Years go by and you bleed to death doing a piece and you don't see the economic results.

Just like the Spanish series ‘Raquel Looks for Her Place’: I am just another human being trying to find my place, my niche, to find comfort for me and my family. That's all I want. And thank you very much for the interview, brother. A hug.

You can read the original note here

Emmanuel Martín Read More »

Tommaso Santambrogio: "Relating to history, justice and memory is fundamental for cinema"

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS - November 25th 2023

RIALTA

Scene from 'Taxibol' (2023); Tommaso Santambrogio (IMAGE Courtesy of the director).

Taxibol (2023) is a tropical concert of silence and fury that reconciles almost antagonistic ways of constructing films. Its story makes eras collide and dilutes temporal barriers in the filmic melting pot of memory, revenge, and even psychological terror.

Shot in Cuba by Italian filmmaker Tommaso Santambrogio, with the participation of Filipino director Lav Diaz, this film will be screened as part of the official selection of the IV INSTAR Festival on Friday, December 8 at the Maison de lʹAmerique Latine in Paris, and on December 8 and Sunday, December 10 at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City.

With Taxibol, Santambrogio approaches the intimate abysses of evil, the infinite damage of totalitarianism that eats away at lives and nations. He peered close enough, without the abyss looking at him, to get a transcendent snapshot that serves as a reference for the meticulous cinematic landscape he has composed with shadows, screams, whispers, and, above all, silence. In Rialta News, we talked about his motives and motivations, processes, dilemmas, obstructions, and darkness.

Taxibol  puts two very different cinematic forms into dialogue in an organic way. Why structure the narrative and the mise-en-scène from such a provocative and daring contrast?

It was a very conscious decision. I was interested in creating a diptych that somehow gave me the possibility of reflecting on cinematic language and at the same time creating an original narrative. In the first part, there is a documentary dialogue between Lav Díaz and Gustavo Fleita. I met both characters and I was interested in their universes, their worlds, their sensibilities, their identities. And, through the awareness of what each of them was, I found a sort of canovaccio,[1] which I then proposed to them. Through this, a completely improvised dialogue was structured.

Lav Díaz's interpretation of himself was very much due to his own ability to move between documentary and fiction, being himself but at the same time inventing himself. So he worked a lot with the language of cinema when it came to conceiving his words and arguments, introducing the motivation of his character's presence in Cuba: the search for that former general of the Ferdinando Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, which was at the same time the way to conceive an open documentary.

This motivation gave me the opportunity to shoot a second part of Taxibol, and at the same time work with elements of genre cinema, because the character of Lav Diaz wants to find the ex-general to kill him and eat his brains. I liked that a lot because it is a reflection on the language of cinema, and it changes through dialogue, through confrontation. This first "documentary" was filmed in the classic style of fiction film dialogue, that is, with shot and counter shot, and with classic and fast editing, very much in the style of conventional fiction cinema.

Once I structured the first part of the film, I thought of approaching the second part as observational documentary filmmaking, although it was really a completely fictional script and structure. So there is a reflection on cinematic language. Many people told me that it was not clear in this second part if Lav actually encountered the general, if Mario Limonta's character was really the general. Other people told me that the first part seemed very well written, and at the same time, it managed to propose to the public a debate on what is cinematic language, what is reality, and what is fiction. I was very interested in that. I took a chance with that structure, with that form, because I also wanted to create a diptych between Cuba and the Philippines, between good and evil, and express it on a cinematographic scale.

Poster of 'Taxibol' (2023); Tommaso Santambrogio (IMAGE Courtesy of the filmmaker)

Aside from acting, did Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz have any other role in the development, shooting, and post-production of Taxibol ?

Lav was not involved in the shooting and post-production of Taxibol, nor in the development of the second part, because his position is that everyone has to be free and express himself: to achieve everything from his style and ability. He did watch the film once it was finished; but before finalizing the audio post-production and color correction.

We shared some ideas and positions, and it was very interesting. But what I am very grateful to Lav is that he gave me his presence, his essence as a director and as a human being, with sincerity, transparency, and trust in the first part; thus offering me the possibility of thinking and structuring a second part, which, always respecting his position, is completely different from what is generally his own cinema, his filmic identity.

Scene from 'Taxibol' (2023); Tommaso Santambrogio (IMAGE Courtesy of the director).

The film involves professional and non-professional actors, Cuban and foreign, and from several generations. How did you deal with the singularities of each one, to blend them into the filmic entity that is Taxibol?

The participation of the actors was very interesting as a process. In the first part, because I treated it as if it were an autonomous film. When I shot it I never thought of a second part. I was very interested in the connection that is created between the characters. I spent a lot of time talking with Lav, and Gustavo. It was very interesting to see the possibility of that connection, because they were two very singular universes, with very specific positions and sensibilities, and it was interesting to establish relationships of classic cinema in the style of Casablanca, as if the characters were countries.

Gustavo is a Cuban character, but he is also Cuba, and Lav is a bit like the Philippines. That other dialogue interested me, and the second part is like a concession. In this one, what interested me was finding actors who worked a lot with their voices, who were very recognized for their voices, like Mario Limonta, Armando Pérez, or Mayra Mazorra. Mayra is also from television and cinema, but she works from her training in theater. She uses her voice more than her body. Armando is a singer of the Opera de la Calle. And Limonta is also recognized for his work in radio, as one of the main voices in Cuba. That helped me when I decided to work with this cast because it was like working again in a documentary way; that is, by inducing them to face acting in a very different way from what they were used to, putting them in an uncomfortable position within the film, a very interesting spontaneity was generated. I think it was a very important decision, and it was very interesting what we achieved by working with the movement of the bodies, the silence, the space, and their dialogues with this space.

What expressive value, what dramatic and philosophical connotation do you grant to silence in Taxibol and, in general, in audiovisuals?

I think that silence is noise. It is a sound in cinema and it always has a value, in its stillness, in its tranquility. And it was essential in the second part of Taxibol. In the first part, there is great value in the words, the dialogue, and the language. In the second part, the value is in the repetition. A reference was the music of William Basinski, especially his series of records The Disintegration Loops. It is a music that disintegrates, the sounds disintegrate little by little and that perception, that sensation is created through repetition.

I liked the idea of working with the sounds as if it were something repetitive, in a loop, and at the same time something that gives a sense of claustrophobia within such a large space; plus I used camera movements that allow you to follow the characters throughout the space. I liked to create that dynamic. I think sound is 50 percent of the language of cinema. And it is very important to think about it, to relate to silence, and to work with its possibilities.

Scene from 'Taxibol' (2023); Tommaso Santambrogio (IMAGE Courtesy of the director).

Cultural, anthropological, and material challenges when filming in Cuba?

There were many challenges, and many complications on many levels, to film in Cuba; especially when we shot Taxibol during the pandemic. It was a very complicated time, as in many other countries. In Cuba there was also inflation, there were a lot of blackouts, as well as a curfew.

At the anthropological and cultural level, everything is also very complicated, if you want to do a good job, which implies relating to history, people, relating to culture, being careful, and taking care of yourself. You have to listen to the other, and not put yourself in an authoritarian position, as if I know everything... and I am the Divinity. It's more like talking and becoming something like a megaphone that amplifies and expands what is already there. I tried to be sensitive, fair, and as honest and transparent as possible.

Can Taxibol be considered a film portrait of the impunity of dictators?

It is rather a film portrait of the impunity of evil. It is a portrait that reflects on how in countries, especially in the south of the world, evil enjoys great impunity. Justice is not served, and in many cases, there are violent acts that are completely forgotten, that are neither judged nor punished. Just think of how much has happened, not only in Cuba and the Philippines but also in Italy and many other nations.

I was really interested in dealing with evil in an intimate, personal way, through a figure like Juan Mijares Cruz (Limonta). And I think that relating to history, justice, and memory is fundamental for cinema.

[1] Canovaccio (Italian): Lists of actions and scenes on which the actors of the Italian commedia dell'arte improvised. Game to create stories.

You can read the original note here

Tommaso Santambrogio Read More »

‛And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil’: a fictional chronicle of the overthrow of a tyrant

By ÁNGEL PÉREZ – November 24th, 2023

RIALTA

Scene from ‛And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil' (2023); Saleh Kashefi (IMAGEN Vía: www.visionsdureel.ch)

In the final shots of 'And How Miserable is the Home of Evil' (Saleh Kashefi, 2023), we see Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, curled up in his seat, one hand to his face, dejected, awaiting his imminent defeat. While the camera closes and opens the frame to show different angles of the ayatollah's afflicted body, the sounds of protests are heard in the background like echoes resounding in his consciousness, the exclamations of the people who have come determined to cut off the oppressor's head. The noise of the demonstrations gradually permeates the scene in a sort of progressive materialization of the forces that now threaten the tyrannic order. A voice announces: "There he is!" and just at that moment the film ends.

'And How Miserable…' is presented as an in situ documentary reportage on the (future) fall of the dictatorial regime. Iranian artist Saleh Kashefi, currently exiled in Switzerland, manages to subvert, in this forceful film essay, the representation that the Islamic clerical power imposes.

To make this film, the director appropriated some videos from Ali Khamenei's official website, where records of his speeches and public interventions are archived. This is political propaganda aimed at intensifying the symbolic legitimacy of the regime. The filmmaker subjects these videos to a forceful process of re-signification. Once they have been processed for 'And How Miserable...', these recordings favor the dismantling of the Iranian ideological veil.

But Kashefi not only undertakes an exercise of (re) editing archives. His tactic is to contaminate these images with recordings of citizen protests that have taken place in his country in recent years. Among others, he uses sound recordings of the demonstrations unleashed after the death of young Mahsa Amini by the Islamic religious police. Videos of some of these events can be found on the Instagram profile @1500tasvir. More sound footage is used from other sites or virtual channels, such as @blackfishvoice, whose description reads: "We are not neutral, we are on the side of the oppressed". Such virtual spaces serve as support for civil actions, and the content they gather is a testimony of that reality that the narrative of power pretends to suppress. In ‘And How Miserable…', the sound files emanating from those spaces constitute a virus that destroys the political fantasy fueled by the videos on Ali Khamenei's website.

Like Peter Watkins in ‘The War Game’, the Iranian artist builds a documentary fiction/ a chronicle of the future with which he participates, undeniably, in the civic confrontation with the Islamic regime; a confrontation against repression and moral surveillance, against the abuse of power and the intensification of poverty.

I say Watkins' way, not only because Kashefi transmutes these archives into the reportage of journalists covering the unfolding events there - just as the English director's lens in 'The War Game' reports the catastrophe caused by a nuclear attack in Kent, UK. If at any point 'And How Miserable...' continues the legacy of Peter Watkins, it is in underlining - in its prospection of the future, which manipulates the archive through the direct and expository style of reportage - how images are by no means innocent, since, by removing them from their predetermined frames of meaning, the hegemony of their (apparent) truth can be removed.

Director Sergei Loznitsa, an exceptional master of archival work and compilation documentaries, commented in an interview that only ethics differentiates documentaries from fiction. This documentary fiction designed by Kashefi does not place its truth in a genre, nor in the events it narrates, but in the significance (social, political, historical) of its discourse.

The violence of the sound that bursts into the mosque where the supreme leader has been cornered in those last shots of the film is the disturbing violence of historical justice. In just seven minutes, the filmmaker resolves an intervention in these images of Iranian Islamic power that, like in a paranoid painting by Salvador Dalí, invert their symbolic charge.

Scene from ‛And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil' (2023); Saleh Kashefi (IMAGEN Vía: www.visionsdureel.ch)

Competing at the IV INSTAR Film Festival, ‘And How Miserable Is the Home of Evil’ will be available to Cuban audiences from December 4 to 10 on the online platform Festhome. It will also be screened in theaters for audiences in Buenos Aires (at the Centro Cultural General San Martín, Tuesday 5 and Sunday 10), Mexico City (at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Friday 8 and Sunday 10), and Barcelona (at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa, Wednesday 6).

After its selection in prestigious festivals such as Visions du Réel and IDFA, this film arrives at the INSTAR Festival as a compelling example of successful communion between aesthetics and politics. Kashefi transgresses Ali Khamenei's fantasy of power while sublimating the imagination of a community eager to escape oppression.

You can read the original note here

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'Abyssal' or the escape of the concrete

By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS -November 22nd, 2023

RIALTA

Still from 'Abisal' (2021); Alejandro Alonso (IMAGE Courtesy of INSTAR Film Festival)

Abyssal (Alejandro Alonso2021) is a chronicle of the eternal end, the melancholic beauty of decomposition, and the impressive precipitation of wounded leviathans into the mouth of Hell, piece by piece.

As in his previous film Terranova (2020) –co-directed with the Spaniard Alejandro Pérez– with the city in full spectral transmutation, Alonso cartografía aquí la erosión, el desmoronamiento, la fuga de lo concreto, la disolución de lo sólido. Abyssal –que como parte del IV Festival de Cine INSTAR estará disponible para los públicos cubanos en la plataforma online Festhome del 4 al 10 de diciembre, siempre entre 10:00 de la mañana y 12:00 de la noche– capta un universo en transición hacia misteriosos estados de la existencia, incomprensibles para el raciocinio humano.

The film may be, as its title suggests, a peek into the deepest realms of life, where the roots of the Tree of the World barely reach. Viewers in Buenos Aires are invited to go there -also due to INSTAR's transnational initiative- on Tuesday, December 5, at the Centro Cultural General San Martín, as well as other moviegoers on Thursday 7, at the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa in Barcelona; on Friday 8, at La Maison de l'Amérique Latine, in Paris, and on Sunday 10, at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City.

El laureado Alonso here maps the erosion, the crumbling, the escape from the concrete, the dissolution of the solid. ‘Abyssal’ –which, as part of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, will be available to Cuban audiences on the online platform Festhome from 4 to 10 December, always between 10:00 and 00:00– captures a universe in a transition towards mysterious states of existence, incomprehensible to human reasoning. El hombre de la cámara (1929): toda una apología del bello y sincrónico poder de la industria como eje del progreso de la Humanidad.

Poster for 'Abisal' (2021); Alejandro Alonso (IMAGE Courtesy of INSTAR Film Festival)

In Abisal, Vertov's machines fall silent and lose meaning in their definitive immobility. The pistons no longer run with an unstoppable rhythm toward the future. The gears no longer sing their triumphal hymn and no longer spin like frenzied planets. Rust shrouds them, cushions them, and soothes the cold that the night brings while, at the same time, it swallows them up and deforms their angles. It melts their individualities, shiny and sharp shapes, into a brown, undefined, dusty homogeneity. Little by little, the boats are transformed into dunes. Dust to dust. Water to water.

This last port, as it may seem, does not have the solemn tranquility that could be found in an elephant's graveyard, where monsters rest in peace of titanic bones and ivories. The last sleep of marine giants endures a final torture; this is a circle of Hell where they are condemned to perennial dismemberment because of unknown sins. The stranded moles helplessly accept such an ordeal of mutilation and disfigurement, perhaps praying inwardly to be left to drown in peace, surrendered to a corrosive dullness and a benevolent self-forgetfulness.

They also suffer from the intrusion of men, who swarm among them, charged with breaking their ribs and spines, tearing apart the glorious work of other men: these old monuments to the triumph of will over Nature and God himself. With the dazed mechanics of perpetuum mobile, they fulfill a de-civilizing, anti-Machinist task, like termites that anchor their existence and subsistence in the conscientious dismantling of the sturdiest structures conceived by engineers. perpetuum mobile, cumplen una tarea descivilizatoria, antimaquinista, como termitas que anclan su existencia y subsistencia en el descoyuntamiento concienzudo de las más fuertes armazones pensadas por los ingenieros.

The anthropomorphic figures end up merging, becoming indistinguishable in the ruinous landscapes where they perform their annihilation tasks. From aggressive and strange entities, they become complements, symbiotic residents of these sleepy wrecks overlooking the waters of the last day.

Still from 'Abisal' (2021); Alejandro Alonso (IMAGE Courtesy of INSTAR Film Festival)

These men of Abisal, trapped in the cemetery next to the endless bones they must dislocate, suffer the tautological fate of Sisyphus. The doomsayers are both condemned and ignorant of it. In several of Abyssal's best shots, Alonso -always the cinematographer of his films- fuses his laborious silhouettes with the decomposing masses, tying them to the same fate. They are crepuscular visions where the imperious backlight annuls all perception of individuality; they are spaces invaded by dense vapors that devour shapes; they empty them of volume and blur any identity.

The main character (Raudel González Cordero) seems, at times, to acquire a slight awareness of inhabiting a timeless, strange place, marginalized from the dialectic flow of existence. A constant impulse leads him to pry into the labyrinthine bowels of the dead ships, to rummage through their secrets, the remnants of life that may remain in the corners and are suddenly revealed, generating chaos in the silence. He seeks reasons for his redundant labors: the destruction of the immobile, the useless, the dead.

He is drawn to tales of the supernatural, besieged by the sense that there is something beyond the pre-established normality and the final judgments about good and evil, about what "is" and "isn't" without nuance. Possibly, he perceives what lies beyond because he already inhabits it, because he is a ghost still unaware of this new state. Or because perhaps he has always been a ghost. Doubt and unease never leave him and make him dissonant among his companions, who are more at ease with their surroundings.

Abyssal proposes the immersion in a sphere of estrangement and atrophy, inhabited by monstrosities and specters, illuminated by a sun at the end of the world, whose moon is replaced by the cyclopean orbit of a lighthouse: a sort of infernal Cerberus that seems to maintain a careful panoptic surveillance over the whole place. Alejandro Alonso unfolds a diffuse and abysmally beautiful story about the last remnants of life, awaiting the definitive apocalypse that will plunge everything into nothingness, where, at last, it will be possible to dream.

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INBAL joins the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women with an extensive program

Bulletin No. 1655 - November 24, 2023

INBAL

  • These activities will take place within the 16 Days of Activism against Violence against Women and Girls campaign framework.

 

  • The activities will take place in different museum spaces and concert halls of the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature.

The Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico and the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature (INBAL), through the Directorate General of Fine Arts, have organized activities within the framework of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the campaign of 16 days of activism against violence towards women and girls. These activities will occur in various museum spaces and concert halls from November 25th to December 10th.

The program includes multidisciplinary events that bring together dance, visual arts, music, theater, literature, conferences, and workshops within spaces and meeting points that will encourage reflection on gender violence, in a day that seeks to heal, through art, the feelings about the injustice and inequality that exists against women.  

Before the 16 days of activism against gender violence, the San Carlos National Museum held, on Wednesday, November 22, and Thursday, November 23, several guided tours to make visible the work of women painters, while the National Museum of Prints held on Thursday 23, the 4th day of November with N for Orange, which brought together works from various artistic areas. Noviembre con N de Naranja, que reunió trabajos de diversas áreas artísticas. 

Likewise, the National Theater Coordination will present the play 'A Good Mother', directed by Guadalupe Damián and Juan Carlos Vives, starting this Friday and until Sunday, December 17 (Fridays at 8:00 p.m.); Cultural Extension will offer, starting this day at 11:00 a.m., the program 'I read... therefore I am!' with a reading by actor Arturo Rosales and the Printmaking Museum will carry out the program “Embracing narratives, resignifying spaces’, with workshops and talks on violence against women.

The Printmaking Museum (Munae) and the Franz Mayer Museum will carry out the activities against gender violence.

Through collaboration between the women who work in these neighboring museums, the event will take place on November 24, 25, and 26 and consists of a series of workshops and conversations focused on identifying, articulating, and reflecting on situations of violence against women, through graphic art and embroidery.

The first activity took place on November 24 with the lecture-workshop 'Gender Violence: Do I Know It, do I Live It, do I Practice It', with the speaker Mónica S. Amilpas García, followed by the lecture-workshop 'Psychological first aid in the face of gender violence', in the library of the Franz Mayer Museum.

On Saturday, November 25, from 11:30 am to 12:45 pm, there will be the discussion session 'Muses or Creators, Women in Graphics and Embroidery’, a space dedicated to weaving narratives about the role of women in art and their field of action in graphics and embroidery through time. Mayela Flores, professor and researcher at the Iberoamerican University and visual artist and exhibitor at the Munae, Patricia Soriano, will participate at the library of the Franz Mayer Museum.

There will also be simultaneous activities such as ‘Stamp your voice. Graphic to take away’; it will be possible to bring clothes, scarves, bags, or any fabric item to print with your own design or the event's design; also an open mic. Women's poetry reading, in which women can read poems by themselves or other poets; Body stamps, an invitation to the temporary tattoo stand with an anti-violence of gender theme; and photo embroidery and embroidery in print.

Starting Saturday, November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the date on which the 16 days of activism against violence against women and girls begin, the Museo Nacional de San Carlos will present 16 capsules, one per day, about women painters from the exhibition 'Painting in Feminine. Women in the Mexican art system 1846-1940. Homage to Leonor Cortina’. At 2:00 pm it will open with the capsule ‘The Woman Painter in the 19th Century’.

On the same day, Cultural Extension, at the N. Lira Museum in Tlaxcala, at 2:00 pm, will present the program ‘I Read... Therefore I am! 20 years’, with the reading of The Voice of Women, with texts by Adela Fernández, Josefina Vicens, and María Luisa Puga, read aloud by actress Ángeles Marín; the José María Velasco Gallery, at 2:00 pm, will host the discussion ‘The different forms of vi