The Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), directed by Cuban artivist Tania Bruguera, presented the official selection of films in competition of its V Film Festival, which will take place between October 28 and November 3 next on screens in Europe and America, and includes collateral shows and the presentation of a bilingual printed magazine.

The program of films in competition, competing for the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award, endowed with 3,000 dollars to support the next work of its director, includes 15 titles produced by filmmakers from Cuba, Hong Kong, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Palestine, China, Ukraine, Guinea-Bissau, Russia, Croatia and Costa Rica.

Cuban filmmaker José Luis Aparicio, curator of the festival, explains to DIARIO DE CUBA the principles that govern this selection.

“The selection criteria for the V INSTAR Film Festival are basically the same as those we outlined for the previous edition, which was the first to try out a transnational structure, with screenings and other activities in multiple cities around the world,” he says. 

“In tune with the general line of the Institute, we decided to focus on those filmmakers who are at the intersection between cinema and artivism. The 15 works in competition address some of the most urgent and complex issues of their respective socio-political contexts, and do so through experimentation with audiovisual language. We focus, above all, on artists working in dictatorial or authoritarian regimes, under the siege of war, or who have been forced to live in the diaspora,” Aparicio adds.

The selection in competition includes the Cuban short films La historia se escribe de noche (2024, Alejandro Alonso); Parole (2024, Lázaro González); Petricor (2022, Violena Ampudia), and Souvenir (2024, Heidi Hassan). All produced by creators living in the diaspora.

Joining these are Nome (2023, Sana Na N'Hada), a feature film by the director considered the first Guinean filmmaker; Ramona (2023, Victoria Linares Villegas), a film that mixes fiction and documentary, directed by one of the most prominent voices in Dominican cinema today; and Republic (2023, Jin Jiang), shot clandestinely in a secret location in downtown Beijing.

Also appearing in the competition are An Asian Ghost Story (2023, Bo Wang), an examination of Asian modernization through a unique business: the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War; Dreams about Putin (2023, Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez), an essay on the collective unconscious from Moscow's invasion of Ukraine; and Dreams like paper boats (2024, Samuel Suffren), about a father and daughter living in modern-day Port-au-Prince.

Included are Smoke of the Fire (2023, Daryna Mamaisur); self-referential film-essay about a Ukrainian filmmaker emigrated to Portugal; Only the Moon Will Understand (2023, Kim Torres); Still Free (2023, Vadim Kostrov); Three Promises (2023, Yousef Srouji), and Wild Flowers (2022, Karla Crnčević).

“As for the collateral shows, we are inaugurating a new section called Panorama del Cine Cubano,” Aparicio points out. “It is non-competitive, and there we will exhibit some of the most recent works of Cuban independent cinema, which has always been one of the main focuses of our festival since its first edition. In this section we will exhibit some works that have already gone through previous editions and also films from the last two years made by filmmakers from the diaspora and others living in Cuba.”

“The other non-competitive parallel section will be our Contemporary Chinese Independent Film Retrospective, made in collaboration with the Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA). There will be seven Chinese films, including the two in the competition, which will allow us to understand the evolution, diversity and difficulties that this alternative movement has gone through in China, made outside official institutions, and will also allow us to establish a dialogue or a mirror relationship between this and the diversity of independent cinema in Cuba,” he comments.

“This exhibition will be held particularly in our Munich headquarters, in the space of the Villa Stuck Museum, as one of the activities of the exhibition 'The Condition of No', which is an exhibition of Tania Bruguera that has already been inaugurated in that institution and during the weekend of November 1 to November 3 will include these films,” Aparicio specifies.

In addition to this German museum, the venues confirmed so far for the V INSTAR Film Festival are Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and Berkeley, in California, United States. In addition, there will be online screenings for Cuba, to which residents of the island will have access, as in previous years, through the Festhome platform.

Aparicio emphasizes that the festival's 2024 selection fosters contact, dialogue and feedback between films made by creators in authoritarian contexts, in conflict with power and diaspora, such as the Cuban one.

“It seems to us that this could enrich it, and it could also help us find new strategies, to see ourselves reflected in others, to break this endogamic circle that Cuban cinema, or Cuban culture and art, can sometimes be,” he says.

The V INSTAR Film Festival will have a printed magazine, Fantasma material, which will be presented on October 26 at the Filmoteca de Madrid. This first issue includes a dossier dedicated to filmmaker Nicolas Guillen Landrian and another one to map the situation of Cuban cinema today, by authors from several countries.

On that occasion, the film Mafifa, by Cuban Daniela Muñoz Barroso, which won the main prize at the 4th edition of the festival, held in December 2023, will be screened at the Azcona Hall of the Madrid institution at 7:30PM.