The official selection in competition of the V INSTAR Film Festival, to be held from October 28 to November 3, includes a quartet of short films that become an appreciable sample of the vigorous discursive and aesthetic directions taken by the Cuban audiovisual, at a healthy distance from the sterile filmic officialism of the island.

Although we cannot speak of a cohesive “movement”, it is not wrong to include Petricor (Violena Ampudia, 2022), La historia se escribe de noche (Alejandro Alonso, 2024), Souvenir (Heidi Hassan, 2024) and Parole (Lázaro González, 2024) in a Cuban film “new wave” propelled mainly from the field of independent directors and producers, now almost entirely resident in the diaspora.

From a construction of the filmic narrative based on the fragmentary, the intimate and existential, as well as essayistic, in pursuit of generating lyrical images, these four films converge in a poetics of uprooting, absence, anguish and darkness. From their differences, they seem to recognize themselves as legatees of the milestone that the documentary short film The Ilusion (Susana Barriga, 2008) marked in the filmic approach to the Cuban exile.

Parole reveals itself as the title that is aesthetically closest to Barriga's title, given its parallel and contrasting narrative, which combines leaden, melancholic and solitary images that symbolize the uprooted condition in which its director seems to recognize himself, with the warm, familiar echoes that arrive from his native home, located at an impossible distance.

Now, contrary to Barriga's traumatic collision with his émigré father -close at the time, but unreachable- that she recorded off-camera in The Illusion, González reveals his mother, still living in Cuba, as an endearing inaccessibility that motivates him to persist in his American exile, not to look back, to the insular Gomorrah, on pain of becoming a salty statue.

After the historical review he undertook in his previous documentary Sexilio (2021), about the homosexual “Marielitos”, Gonzalez seems ready to focus his curiosity and analysis on himself, as a migrated subject of the present. His persona expands into a cartography of the eternal separation that continues to determine Cuba as an island sliced and quartered into “tiny pieces” that germinate far from the geographical matrix, torn between hope and longing.

For Violena Ampudia, the dilemma of the exile has a precise and delicate metaphor in the floating garden that mottles over the tables of her temporary “camp” in Belgium, during her creative residency at Docs Nomads, which favored the filming of Petricor. A myriad of glass jars contain fragile plants, whose roots do not yet know the soil in which they should naturally take root.

This mountain of the same Cuban origin as Ampudia, remains in a precarious, intermediate state of dangerous transience. They do not even have the luck of a nursery, which would provide them with small portions of land to favor their first growth. They are in danger of atrophying or drowning in the short term, unable to hold on to anything. Their development is compromised, regardless of the care they are given. They are as much in crisis as their caregiver, who seems to be in equally unstable territory, although more likely than the country she left in the irreversible past.

The filmmaker deals with the psychological and cultural reconstruction that exile imposes on her in a world that looks like a beautiful but strange marsh where emotion contrasts with nostalgia, liquefying any possible sense of stability.

Heidi Hassan has perhaps filmed, together with Patricia Pérez, one of the most intense and personal filmic memoirs on contemporary Cuban exile: the feature-length documentary A media voz (2019), in which she pours all her cache of memories, longings and melancholy. After this sensitive exorcism, Souvenir goes back to the path of allegation, denunciation and even rage.

A stroll through a German museum dedicated to naive nostalgia for the times of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in Berlin provokes in the author a simultaneous reaction of astonishment and fury at the romanticizing fickleness of this historical period, so fateful for that nation, divided after World War II, and for all nations under the yoke of the Soviet empire.

Cuba is a reluctant, extemporaneous, entrenched and absurd remnant of those times. What for Europeans is a past washed by nostalgia, picturesqueness and frivolity, for Cubans is a stagnant and dense present. “Enough, get out of my house!”, says the director to the visitors who look around the ‘model room’ that reproduces the ‘comfort’ of a socialist family in the 70s or 80s, in the totalitarian GDR.

The film exudes the helplessness of the Plague infested person who witnesses how his buboes become tourist attractions for future beings nostalgic for times of death and decay they never lived. Hassan seems to feel that the visitors are going through the most unfathomable recesses of his entrails without asking his permission. They invade her pain, which is a lancinating, perpetual pain, and take selfies with her endless howl of exile.

Meanwhile, La historia se escribe de noche follows a more cryptic expressive path than the other three films, suggesting the viewer to sublimate himself as a pure sensorial entity, capable of undertaking an initiatory journey whose first stage is the submersion in a universe of shadows.

The film takes place in an eternal night, built with records of some of the blackouts that color and scourge the daily life of Cubans in Cuba. Alonso devises a poetic blackout that suspends reality, engulfs it and envelops it in a timeless time. Cuba is a country self-segregated from time. Its darkness is an absolute that no longer requires classification, for it has no antipodes to oppose it. Light does not exist here. Only something that used to be darkness and now is everything.

Alonso also invites us to feel again cinema as an immersive experience, decontaminated by the contexts that howl around the small and very small screens. He proposes a trip to the past -better, a timeless journey-, when cinema was a ceremony, a cult to the gods of the big screen, a ritual that also suspended reality, but in a magical way. Blackouts are not magical, misery is not beautiful, the absurd reality they provoke is bitter, poisoned. But Alonso manages to compose with horror a moving apocalyptic requiem for the nation shipwrecked in darkness.