The Cuban film archive, hegemonically governed by official institutions since 1959, is a compendium of censorship and omissions.

Every divergent or anomalous vision was purged. Every heresy found its punishment. In an autophagic process that has become cyclical, filmmakers who do not conform to the norm are condemned to jail, ostracism or exile. Their films, the ones that survive, become the pasture of neglect and oblivion. The gap, though outlawed and precarious, is in independent cinema. A movement that they try to break systematically, but always finds ways to subsist and reorganize itself. It often operates on the margins of the law, under harassment, in the absolute outdoors. Its consolidation since the '90s of the last century and, above all, in the 2000s, is one of the most remarkable acts of resistance in contemporary Cuban culture. 

Transforming Documenta Halle's Kabinett 1 into a movie theater, as happened at this festival, speaks of the displacement that this audiovisual production usually suffers, often consumed in private and intimate spaces, with minimal resources such as small screens and precarious sound. A large part of the materials compiled in this archive, not a few of them censored and, for the most part, of alternative or independent production, have stealthily circulated from hand to hand. If to list these films is to make the archive, to make the cinema is to make a temporary center for their consumption and study. The archive “Land without images” camped out for ten days at Documenta Halle. With a program of daily screenings of approximately 100 hours and more than 150 films, it recovers that Cuba that was taken from us in some of its most powerful visions.