The 2nd INSTAR Film Festival will take place, almost entirely online, from December 4 to 11. For one week, the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR) and the Cuban Cinema in Quarantine (CCC) collective propose an inclusive event where gender boundaries will largely be blurred.

According to the organizers, the event will be divided into several sections: "Mal de archivo", "Derivas Queer", "La isla en peso", "La otra Cuba", "Cine-performance", "Márgenes", "Así de simple", and "Foco-Latinoamérica". The program includes eleven thematic cycles, a retrospective dedicated to Manuel Marzel, Cuban filmmaker based in Spain, and some special presentations. Among the latter are the films A media voz, by Patricia Pérez and Heidi Hassan, as well as Quiero hacer una película, by Yimit Ramírez, and Corazón azul, by Miguel Coyula, both censored in Cuba.

A total of 41 films will be shown: 33 Cuban films, and the rest by filmmakers from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Colombia and Spain. There will also be 33 films considered premieres on the island.

There will also be five talks on Cuban cinema and migration, distribution in Cuban cinema, gender cinema in Latin America and the Caribbean, Cuban audiovisuals on gender and divergent identities, among other topics.

One of the moments that generates the highest expectations is the conversation scheduled for Saturday 4 at 10:00 a.m. (Cuban time) between the founder of this festival and director of INSTAR, artivist Tania Bruguera, and Swiss creator Milo Rau. For his part, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios will talk about his career as a filmmaker on a date yet to be set.

Also announced is a workshop on videomapping and, in alliance with the German organization HKW and its Alphabet School, the workshop "Deconstructing a Community's Visual Archive".

The call for the II INSTAR Film Festival was launched for feature, medium and short films made from 2019, "beyond classifications and taxonomic divisions". The space was also opened to new audiovisual aesthetics related to expanded cinema, experimental and others more attached to the visual arts.

In order to obtain more information, and with the interest of joining the online experience, those interested may contact the following e-mail address: festivaldecine@instar.org.

With the aim of supporting independent Cuban audiovisual, the first edition of this alternative film festival organized by INSTAR took place from December 6 to 8, 2019, thanks to the impulse of actress and filmmaker Lynn Cruz.

In a recent interview for Rialta Noticias, filmmaker José Luis Aparicio and poet Katherine Bisquet, coordinators of CCC, stressed that the curatorship of this festival was interested in "risky works that explore the idea of the unusual, the experimental: the limits of cinematographic creation".

"We want films that arouse moving experiences and that do not leave viewers indifferent," they added. "Bearing in mind the same precepts of INSTAR as an institution, we are interested in a type of creation that questions and problematizes its reality, the society in which it is inserted. Works that have an impact on the civic space".

INSTAR -headquartered at Tejadillo Street #214, between Aguacate and Compostela, Old Havana- was founded on May 20, 2015. Since then it has developed, under the direction of Tania Bruguera, as a "civic education center" and a "democratic and horizontal" space that promotes artivism in favor of the historical memory of art and civil society as a whole.