The fifth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, scheduled for October 28 to November 3 this year 2024, is once again ubiquitous in nature, as a result of the impossibility of being held in Cuban theaters, despite being thought and executed mostly by nationals. 

It is an event spread across the globe, with venues, some of which can almost be considered regulars, in Barcelona (Zumzeig Cine Cooperativa) and Madrid (Cineteca), in Paris (Maison de l'Amérique latine), in Munich (Villa Stuck Museum) and in the United States (Berkeley Art & Pacific Film Archive). 

Once again, audiences on the island will be able to access the competing and collateral selections through the digital platform Festhome. 

The migrant nature of the event resonates organically in the official competition, made up of 15 films, four of them by Cuban authors, made by transhumant creators, many of them absent from their homelands or marginalized to alternative niches and frowned upon by the respective status quo. Thus, the event consolidates itself as a favorable platform for dissident filmic expressions. 

The selection resembles a great dissonant chorus, whose polyphonic rebelliousness does not focus on propagandist and libelist facileisms, but rather goes up complex creative paths, in search of authentic expressions, of high intimate depths, underlining the value of individual will against the homogeneous genuflection preached by the regimes with which almost all the filmmakers in competition here establish discussion. 

The forceful Cuban presence - Petricor (Violena Ampudia, 2022), La historia de escribe de noche (Alejandro Alonso, 2024), Parole (Lázaro González, 2024), Souvenir (Heidi Hassan, 2024) - at the festival is offset by titles from Chinese filmmakers, Russian, Ukrainian, Costa Rican, Dominican, Palestinian, Croatian, Haitian and Guinean filmmakers, who expand the initiative, globalizing it and making it stand out as a space to be highlighted in the crowded festival panorama of the planet.

The following are ten titles by non-Cuban filmmakers that merit the attention of all potential viewers of the V INSTAR Film Festival.

1. An Asian Ghost Story (Bo Wang, 2023)

Chinese director Wang Bo proposes with An Asian Ghost Story, co-produced between Hong Kong and the Netherlands, an audiovisual pilgrimage from the terrifying to the grotesque, from the supernatural to the absurd, from the bizarre to the sardonic; in which historical review intertwines with myth, and the paranormal invades rationalist “normality”. 

The story mixes archive, fable, politics, history, haunting and parapsychology, to launch an eccentric look at the history of Hong Kong and its liminal political nature.

The hair of a deceased Japanese woman is sold as raw material to feed the burgeoning wig industry in 1960s Hong Kong, affected by a Western blockade against hair from communist nations such as China, North Korea and the then North Vietnam. 

The anonymity of the bushy jet-black manes confuses the watchers. They cannot elucidate with precision the origins of so much similar hair, which does not care about ideologies, but about memories, pain, uprooting.

The dense and limp hairs serve as a handle for the spirits of the original owners of the scalps, who end up traveling around the world through the many heads that “wear” them as fashionable wigs. No respite.

History itself is revealed as a kind of ritual that seeks to evoke specters of the unknown past in order to understand and, more often than not, justify the present of contemporary mediums who do not allow the exhausted dead to rest.

2. Dreams about Putin (Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez, 2023)

The invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 turned Vladimir Putin into a recurring nightmare for thousands of Russians, who experienced a sort of premonition of the definitive consolidation of quasi-Czarist totalitarianism in their country. 

The short film by Korkia and Fishez, co-produced by Belgium, Hungary and Portugal, recreates some of the many dreamlike testimonies reported by dreamers on social networks. 

Perhaps they chose some of the most bizarre ones, which underline the dictator as a latent, ubiquitous, inevitable threat; as an omnipresence that seizes that territory of freedom that is the mind and especially the dream, where spatio-temporal ties, psychological conditioning, even one's own identity, can be transcended. 

Putin invaded the physical and sovereign space of Ukraine, but he also violently penetrated into the innermost territories of the mind and soul of its citizens. One tends to forget that the first countries invaded by tyrants are their own countries.

The filmmakers reproduce dreams with digital animations that shun the precious polish achieved by CGI in the most industrial filmic contemporaneity. 

The images seem to have been conceived for purely investigative purposes, whose pragmatism saves them from any excessive filigree, or pretensions of anatomical, spatial realism. All that is required is an understanding of the event, the circumstances and the characters involved. They emanate an unsettling pragmatism, while at the same time gaining in nuisance.

Uncomfortable dreams require irritating representations that replicate, as faithfully as possible, the bitterness and fear they triggered in their initial victims.

3. Ramona (Victoria Linares Villegas, 2023)

With Ramona, the Dominican Republic made its first mark at the Berlin Film Festival, which hosted the world premiere of the second feature film by Linares Villegas (Lo que se hereda) in its Generation section, 2023. 

The film transcends the conventional taxonomies of fiction and documentary, to construct itself as a sort of “fake making of” or “induced documentary”, and thus map the thorny panorama of teenage pregnancy in the Caribbean nation.

The filming of an alleged fiction starring Ramona, a 15-year-old girl who is expecting a baby and, despite this, wants to be an actress, becomes a pretext for the possible interpreter of the character, Camila Santana, to investigate a group of young people in these circumstances, residents of the most humble areas of the country, abundant in early pregnancies. And they end up being the real protagonists.

The device employed by the director can be traced back to films such as the Cuban short film Hombres de Mal Tiempo (1968), directed by Argentine Alejandro Saderman, and in more recent works such as the feature films Casting JonBenet (Kitty Green, 2017), from the United States and Orlando, my political biography (Paul B. Preciado, 2023), of French production.

In the Dominican Republic itself, it has an important precedent: Dossier de ausencias (2020), directed by Cuban Rolando Díaz, which, based on a fictional character who plunges into the same social depths, explores another cardinal facet of teenage pregnancy: the equivocal fates of those often unwanted children, who are given up for adoption to more favored families.

4. Republic (Jin Jiang, 2023)

The feature-length documentary Republic is a dystopia in that it can be defined as the corpse of illusion and the wreck of hope. 

The title directed by the Chinese Jian Jiang is an ode to impossibility, denial and stubbornness, all embodied in its protagonist Li Eryang, a self-confessed extemporaneous hippie, who recognizes himself as a castaway of his own contemporaneity.

Hidden in a tiny living alveolus -a motley room that must have demanded real framing feats from the cinematographer-, Eryang advocates living off the universe, in a country where existence depends on the work and money that communism once promised to disappear. 

Contrary to state hypocrisy, the young musician and sybarite is consistent with his libertarian outlook.

The house is a hideaway, almost a “pocket dimension” in which reality happens differently. Time stands still or expands in strange ways. The scarce light that penetrates through the windows is equivocal. Days and nights merge into a hallucinated, drowsy, happy perpetuity.

The redoubt is a platonic republic, ruled by artists and intellectuals, where leisure, psychedelic experiences, contemplation and English music of the sixties and seventies reign. 

There they coexist, in strange harmony, with the book “The Governance and Administration of China” by the perpetual and neo-authoritarian president Xi Jinping, whom Eyrang at times says he admires, before the incredulous gazes of the hordes of outsiders who pass through this dwelling without locks or prohibitions.

5. Smoke of Fire (Daryna Mamaisur, 2023)

Smoke from the fire aims at a gentle reflection on the awe, uncertainty and the reconfiguration of identity. 

The director portrays herself at the height of the process of coming to terms with her otherness, as a bizarre return to a second childhood. She plunges into an inexorable process of unlearning and unlearning herself as a national subject, to mutate into a migrant, transnational, diasporic subject.

The idiomatic transition, no less than violent and traumatic, from the native Ukrainian to the adopted Portuguese, allegorizes the acrimony of such a reluctant alchemy. The protagonist filmmaker explores herself as a territory that becomes unfamiliar as she moves away from the eternal matrix that is the homeland (or rather, the motherland) for her natives.

In spite of the transformations that the notions of homeland, nation, patriotism and geo-cultural roots are undergoing on a global scale, under the powerful influence of social networks, the Antaeus Syndrome hits the foreigner hard.

The Russian invasion of the country of origin reinforces the discomfort in those who seem to feel the first symptoms of the refugee, a status that beats his life with desperate winds.

Under the influence so close and so far away of this absurd contest, Mamaisur seems to experience an irrevocable transmutation in a transitional place, in a margin, in a tangent subject with respect to the realities settled on the security of the impregnable nest that confers the space in which it began to exist. 

The often frivolous, banal and hypocritical concept of “citizen of the world” crashes against the nostalgia and uneasiness of uprooting.

6. Only the moon will understand (Kim Torres, 2023) 

This is another of the films that mark a clear hybrid line in the V INSTAR Festival, which approaches the polysemic territory of essay cinema. Only the moon will understand is a chronicle of nothingness, statism and resistance to the advance of emptiness over the calm rural population of Manzanillo in Costa Rica.

Before Torres' cameras, Manzanillo looks like a ghost town inhabited by the living. The specters reside in the legends woven into a local mythopoetic corpus. They are echoes of a past more alive and magical than the stagnant filmed present. 

Right in the middle of the almost palpable stillness of the place, people are still being born and growing. There are children, teenagers and young adults moving like warm blood through veins long withered.

The film suggests an insurmountable gap between the futurity that the hordes of rowdy kids inevitably transpire and the dissolution of the village into the landscape, like a footprint imprinted on the desert dune. 

This soft collision reaches the dimensions of a generational tragedy and a shipwreck of hopes. An early frustration threatens the new generations germinated in the dry trunk of Manzanillo.

The short film, co-produced by Costa Rica and the United States, is also an allegory of the volatility and illusory nature of the construct known as the future, something that, like God, if it did not exist, would also be created by human beings by imperative necessity. 

In this Costa Rican Manzanillo, the next day seems to have already passed. The coming year may have already happened some time ago.

7. Still Free (Poka Svobodny, Vadim Kostrov, 2023)

In Still Free you can see the heritage of the German film People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Curt Siodmak and Fred Zinneman, 1930), which, in the light of history, is reformulated as the fragile and splendid calm before of the irruption of the most devastating of storms. In the case of the classic film of the Weimar Republic, the rise of National Socialism. In the case of Kostrov's documentary, Vladimir Putin's Russian imperial militarism.

Katia and Kostia are a young couple. On the threshold of the university, she; In the prelude to military service, he. In the days that remain until their lives change forever, they seek to buy time for the merciless future and allow themselves to be children for a couple more days.

His lackadaisical summer stay at a local lake, during what seems like the last weekend in the world, is resized in cardinal reminiscence. 

As with the carefree young people in Sunday People, whose futures were turned into Nazi darkness—as victims or perpetrators—the transmutatory alchemy of the inconsequential into the transcendent also occurs in Kostrov's film crucible. The nondescript lead shines like essential gold.

Every gesture, every kiss, every lazy trip towards the waters, every silly comment, every lost look, become fossils of happy and irrecoverable times, once they are crushed by the telluric advance of existence. Lost time cannot be recovered, only evoked and lamented when it has already died.

8. Three promises (Yousef Srouji, 2023)

Three Promises compiles family audiovisual records taken by Suha Khamis, mother of the director and his sister Dima, during the beginning of the 21st century marked for Palestine by the Israeli military retaliation against the second Intifada in the West Bank.

Under the increasingly closer noise of bullets and bombs, the family becomes refugees in their own home, which is being won by the danger of death. The rooms become a no man's land that must be avoided at all costs by Suha and Ramzi's marriage and their children. 

Everyone retreats to the least vulnerable areas of the house, under the stairs, in the basement. Deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth.

While negotiating with Allah for the survival of her descendants, in exchange for emigrating from Palestine when it is safe - as witnessed in voiceover from the present -, Suha is possessed by a compulsive need to record the exceptional circumstance; even against her daughter's pleas to stop filming her in the state of anguishing vulnerability to which she is reduced. And even though his life is in danger when he looks out the windows to guess the course of the fighting that lurks in the shadows. 

The mother challenges her own parental affections and instincts in favor of the possible transcendence of the record. The imminent possibility of death seems to trigger in her the need to challenge the great mass anonymity that plunges people into war, and to record the existence of her family, of her perverted happiness. 

9. Wild Flowers (Divle Cvijeće, Karla Crnčević, 2022)

Wildflowers is a film about the day after. It is a story about the rebirth and strange calm that came after the avalanches of fire and death. The Croatian filmmaker compiles and edits videos taken by her father thirty years ago, during the third Balkan war, which shocked the former Yugoslav territory, and caused exoduses and desperate escapes. 

The man returns to his devastated village, films this reunion with everyday life broken by the attacks, interrogates ruins that are at once familiar and strange. 

The landscape seems to be made of echoes, resonances, strewn with hidden explosives ready to explode, if you look directly at where they are ambushed. The war seems to play hide and seek with the daring witnesses of the ghostly loneliness into which the peaceful Croatian village was plunged. One of many.

In off-screen, a dialogic game of memory and forgetfulness takes place between Karla Crnčević and her father. They contrast the memories printed on magnetic tape and those retained in the cerebral jungles of the improvised filmmaker, who like Suha in Three Promises, felt the imperative to record a minimal episode of a war that will always be drawn on the tablets of history with thick, elemental features. 

But Crnčević's father did not film family agonies under the threat of immediate war, or the circumstances of flight, but rather in the calm and mysterious return to the devastated place, which allowed him to capture the silent planetary recovery in the form of a tapestry. of wild flowers.

10. Dreams Like Paper Boats (Samuel Suffren, 2024)

With the fiction short film Dreams like Paper Boats—the only one of a “pure” genre in competition—Haitian Samuel Suffren returns to the INSTAR Festival, whose fourth edition has already hosted Agwe (2021), the first installment of a trilogy in progress about resonances of the enormous migration to the United States in the emotional family network.

Suffren's new proposal, the second of the triptych, dialogues with the majority of the Cuban titles that compete in this installment, doomed as Cuba is to a massive and unstoppable flight, already very similar to the Haitian one. 

As happens in Parole by Lázaro González, the voice channeled through electronic devices serves as a bridge between fragmented beings that hope and despair.

Edouard and his daughter Zara wait for news or for the return of his wife and mother, who emigrated to the North American nation in pursuit of the prosperity that Haiti steals from its citizens. 

His physical absence is exacerbated by the absolute lack of fresh news about his whereabouts and situation. He only managed to send an audio cassette with educational and loving messages for the girl, erotic words for her husband, and a testimony about the sea crossing aboard a boat overflowing with crowds.

The life of the fractured family takes place around these recordings, whose irresolute cyclical nature spurs desperation for new information that never arrives and is compensated by evocations and hallucinations. 

The woman's voice gains in distance and strangeness, it becomes unintelligible, it provokes more and more the impotent fury of the man stranded in the low waters of ignorance and nostalgia.