The fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival will take place during the week of December 4th to December 10th, 2023, in multiple venues around the world, particularly in cities with a significant Cuban expatriate community: Barcelona, Paris, Miami, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo. The selection of films will be available online for Cuba through the Festhome platform. The concept guiding this edition is the transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema and its growing dialogue with diverse cinematographies, especially those of countries also ruled by authoritarian governments.
We thank all the people and organizations that have contributed to the realization of our festival, especially the production and distribution companies of the films in the selection: Lights On, Habanero Film Sales, Producciones Pirámide, the world is ending and I'm making my films, Caja de Luz, Cosmic Productions, KITFILMS, La Cordillera Films, Mediocielo Films, Vega Alta Films, Estudio ST, Micromundo Producciones, ikaik films, Palenque Films, Independientes Bajo Tierra, WunderKabinett Films, Cooperativa Producciones, as well as to all the filmmakers for their works.
The Pure Ones
Carla Valdés León
2021/ Cuba/ 18’
Veritas
Eliecer Jiménez Almeida
2022/ Cuba, USA/ 67’
Press
Three women who dream and make a country...
Fernando Fraguela makes one thing clear: Women Who Dream of a Country (2022) is a film that is made for the present, yes, but above all for the future. Women Who Dream of a Country, with testimonies from activist Daniela Rojo, poet Katherine Bisquet, and professor and art historian Anamely Ramos, is an attempt…
IV INSTAR Film Festival awards the documentaries...
The independent documentary Mafifa (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso, was awarded along with La opción cero (2020), by Marcel Beltrán, at the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival that took place last week in seven cities on two continents, and in Cuba virtually. Mafifa, which makes a surprising…
Mafifa
The INSTAR Festival-winning film Mafifa premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam in 2021, was screened at the Havana Film Festival in 2022, and won the Best Documentary Feature Award at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. In it, Daniela Muñoz Barroso attempts to construct a portrait of the title character, a woman of a more...
Awards
Winners of the IV
INSTAR Film Festival
“Nicolás Guillén Landrián” Award
Mafifa
Daniela Muñoz Barroso
Special Mention
Option Zero
Marcel Beltrán
Official Jury
Alejandro Hernández
Screenwriter, novelist and film producer
Dunja Fehimović
Professor of Hispanic Studies
Paulo Antonio Paranaguá
Journalist, film critic and historian
(Havana). Winner of the Goya Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for All the Women (2013) and nominated for the same award for Cannibal (2013) and The Author (2017). He was also nominated for the Goya for Best Original Screenplay for While the War Lasts (2019) and Adú (2021). He has published three novels and is a professor of screenwriting at the Carlos III University of Madrid, at ECAM and the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic.
(Sarajevo). She received her PhD from the Department of Spanish and the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. She has published the books National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema: Screening the Repeating Island (2018) and Branding Latin America: Strategies, Aims, Resistance (2018, co-edited with Rebecca Ogden). She is co-founder of Cineforo Caribe and the Caribbean Film Teachers Network.
(Rio de Janeiro). Member of the surrealist movement in São Paulo and Paris. PhD in History of Arts and Communications from the Sorbonne and winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship. His works include Le cinéma brésilien (1987), Le cinéma cubain (1990), span>Le cinéma mexicain (1992), Arturo Ripstein (1997), Luis Buñuel: Him(2001), Tradition and Modernity in Latin American Cinema(2003), among others.
Collaborators
Archive