The protagonist of Nome (Sana Na N'Hada, 2023) returns to the village where he grew up after fighting for the independence of his land. But his lust for power and social advancement pushes him to betray the ideals he once fought for. The young people of Republic (Jin Jiang, 2023) try to escape the capitalist dynamics of Chinese society and create a hippie community of communist ideals; however, their lifestyle only demonstrates the meaninglessness of their beliefs. The filmmaker of Smoke of the Fire (Daryna Mamaisur, 2023) finds herself dislocated in her adopted country, lost among the possibilities of a new language with which she fails to fully express her emotions; meanwhile, the director of Wild Flowers (Karla Crnčević, 2022) contrasts, from exile, the operability of personal archives and the negotiations of individuals with their memory.

The corruption of power and the impact of war on collective imaginaries, the maladjustment of youth trapped in authoritarian societies and the violence exercised by dictatorial governments, the existential crises brought about by emigration, and the value of family archives are some of the themes discussed in the “In Competition” titles of the V INSTAR Film Festival, which will take place between October 28 and November 3. Under the guidance of its programmer, director and curator Jose Luis Aparicio, the event is once again betting -in a rigorous program made up of intelligent and problematic works- on political cinema “from countries where freedom of expression and creation are threatened”, in the words of artist Tania Bruguera, director of INSTAR. 

The group of films that aspire to this year's Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award -as Aparicio himself warns in his words “About the curatorship”- is distinguished by the fact that they all “reflect on the world they [their directors] inhabit in an act that inevitably involves a questioning of the forms [of representation]”. From this nexus between linguistic avant-gardism and political vocation emanate the most significant values of these films. And political vocation should be understood as analysis, the need to understand and question the way in which historical determinations and institutional powers impact the fate of citizens, as well as the strategies of resistance they try out. This eticity of form can be seen in the design of the characters and in the discursive effectiveness of the stagings of Solo la luna comprenderá (Only the moon will understand (Kim Torres, 2023), Republic and Dreams like Paper Boats (Samuel Suffren, 2024); in the discursive dismantling and expressive exploration of archival materials in Wild Flowers and Three Promises (Yousef Srouji, 2023); in the intentional stylization of visual design and generic indeterminacy of La historia se escribe de noche (Alejandro Alonso, 2024), Smoke of the Fire and Dreams about Putin (Nastia Korkia & Vlad Fishez, 2023).

But the evident cinematographic values of these works are not the only virtue of the curatorship; another is the inclusion of films linked to cultural geographies as diverse as Ukraine, Croatia, Palestine, China, Russia, Hong Kong, Haiti, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. Such diversity is conducive to the exploration of the social, historical and political conflicts that beset the individual in the contemporary world, as well as the knowledge of the emotional, intimate cliffs of the subjects immersed in such contexts.

Nome is a historical drama, of rigorous dramatic construction, that visits the past of confrontation between the guerrillas of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Portuguese colonial army. Its director was trained in Cuba with the purpose of documenting, as a reporter, the deeds of those anti-colonial guerrillas. The film archive of those sixties and seventies -poetically interwoven in the plot- serves as a backdrop to a story whose plot development only questions the epic breath and the historical truth stamped on those archives. Sana Na N'Hada does not seem too interested in the conflict, but rather in its outcome. The review of the anti-colonial resistance is a catapult to criticize the balance of colonialism itself after the conquest of independence, and a shrewd maneuver to stage how a revolution betrays itself.

Various types of archive make it possible for the documentary An Asian Ghost Story (Bo Wang, 2023) to undertake its revision of the past in Hong Kong. Bo Wang invents a sympathetic fiction to think about the impact of geopolitical relations between Western capitalism, the United States market and Mao's communism in that territory. The ghost that lives in a wig is responsible for recalling these tensions in the landscape of the Cold War, when Asian-made natural hair hairpieces became popular in the United States and the U.S. imposed an embargo on their importation. This prompted radical transformations, both politically and culturally, in Hong Kong, a key port of export for wigs.

An Asian Ghost Story weaves its cinematographic experience under a rigorous visual conception (it manipulates the diverse textures of the archives to its advantage) which, combined with a fictionalization of the documentary discourse, ends up making this essay an exceptional work. Similar ventures of creative risk, also operating with/from archival materials, were undertaken by the filmmakers of Wild Flowers, Three Promises and Dreams about Putin. In these films, the archive is a repository of memory and an irrefutable witness to the passage of time in the subjective configuration of the individual, forced, in a way, to make a pact with oblivion. In Three Promises, Yousef Srouji recovers video recordings made by his mother during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. While the Israeli attacks on the West Bank echo in the background, we see the daily life of a family trying to escape death, shaken by fear... The documentary is a powerful testimony to the resilience of a mother determined to save her home at any cost. The recordings are the record of an act of love, as much as a denunciation of how a child's childhood can be taken away.

At one point, the filmmaker is heard as a child saying to his mother: “Mom, I'm scared; Mom, stop filming”; while the fire caused by the bombing can be seen and the gunshots can be heard echoing. However, now - seeing the impossibility of communicating that experience in its full dimension through the recordings - Srouji decides to place his mother's voice over the images. 

Wild Flowers also attends to the impact of war on the intimate cosmos and the realities of people's bodies. Like Srouji in Three Promises, Karla Crnčević articulates a collaboration between the content of some videotapes and the factual memories of the individual who recorded. The filmmaker digitizes these VHS images where her father documented the devastation of the village where he lived in Croatia during the Balkan War. And as she reviews these records she converses with him over the phone about the moment of filming. Crnčević is not concerned with the impossibility of grasping through the archive the past, as was the case with Srouji; she rather corroborates the importance of its materiality. The disjunctions between what the father remembers and what we see in the images are striking!      

Through a different elaboration in stylistic terms, a rich visual architecture, Dreams about Putin also insists on the weight of war on the conscience of a nation. But it is not concerned with the experience of the attacked, but with the experience of the subjects residing in the aggressor country. Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez, its directors, resorted to 3D animation to materialize the dreams (broadcast in the media) that several Russian citizens had with President Putin after the invasion of Ukraine. Dreams are the space where these beings let free those thoughts or emotions repressed in wakefulness as a consequence of the oligarch's authoritarian regime. The animated segments are expressionistic, sometimes grotesque, but mostly dreamlike, always consistent with the passages they represent. But this film essay also intersperses archival videos taken from YouTube where Putin is exposed in ridiculous situations, or ridiculed by the filmic gesture, which vulgarize the aura of power with which he moves in the public space. The crises of the Russian social imaginary are condensed in Dreams about Putin, which, towards the end, shows live-action images where the “czar” appears behind bars: a manipulation that projects as possible an invasion of dreams in the waking world.         

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine appears, from another perspective, in Still Free (Vadim Kostrov, 2023), in which Kostrov is concerned about the repercussions of the war on the fate of a society and its people beyond the physical disaster. The film records with spontaneity -from an observational criterion that, singularly, mimics a quasi-fictional structure- the recreation in a lake of a certain group of young people during the summer before the beginning of the war. The image overflows with luminosity, but the summer view and the festive atmosphere gradually fade away -more at the level of discourse than at the visual level. And this happens as we get to know the protagonist couple better, when we are already able to foresee their future: Kostya is about to enter the army and Katya is planning to enroll in the university. Both are confident of sustaining their relationship after such accidents. Of course, when we see these young people leaving the spa, with their backs turned, the whole story can only be understood as a vivid picture of a large part of Russian society, of a generation unable to love, whose affections have been broken by false democracy, militarism and autocracy.

Like Still Free, History is Written at Night also allegorizes the state of a country. But through a very different strategy. While Kostrov blurs the boundaries between fiction and documentary, Alonso unfolds a visual fresco where he experiments with the expressive possibilities of shadows and darkness. The point is that this darkness is not a consequence of the night, but of a night plagued by those prolonged power cuts that Cubans suffer more and more. The absence of light eloquently metaphorizes the abyssal situation of the island's inhabitants. It is a film that also makes use, in its own way, of dreams as an expression of the social unconscious, as in Dreams about Putin.

The rest of the Cuban films that aspire to the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award -Parole (Lázaro González, 2024), Petricor (Violena Ampudia, 2022), and Souvenir (Heidi Hassan, 2024)- are devoted to an essential issue in the country's present: emigration. These documentaries dissect this subject with very different aesthetic scalpels, although they become similar insofar as they go beyond the usual argumentation in the genre, as well as in the purpose of experimenting with more performative structures, linked to the tradition of essay cinema. This is a value that can be seen in all the works that can be labeled as documentaries in the selection. The specific theme of exile (approached from the personal prism of the filmmakers) should be highlighted, not only in pieces by Cuban directors, but also in creations of other nationalities such as Dreams like Paper Boats and Smoke of the Fire. (It should be taken into account that the authors of most of the productions present at the festival work from the diaspora, forced to emigrate from dictatorial countries or with an extreme precariousness of material life, where filmmaking, and above all an authentically political cinema, can be virtually impossible).    

In Petricor, Violena Ampudia weaves images of floating plants scattered in her apartment in Belgium; the composition is intimate. The space is narrow and her voice seems to rub the objects... (Only for an instant the camera leaves her room to listen and contemplate the tender daughters of a friend of hers who decided to put down roots outside Cuba). The trigger for her filmic reflection is a WhatsApp audio where a friend comments to the filmmaker that she dreamed of Cuba transformed into a huge floating cemetery. Cuba is far from being a fertile land for her plants, which originated there. Violena's emphasis on floating roots is an emphasis on her own sensibility, which evokes those verses by Jamila Medina Ríos: “He emigrated / There is something there with dispossession: / roots with nowhere to grab”. Violena says she experiences a nostalgia that results from “the need to know what place she occupies in the present”; that nostalgia permeates the entire atmosphere of the images, it is the very subject of her enunciation.

Lázaro González gives Parole a treatment similar to that of Wild Flowers and Three Promises: he places his mother's voice (WhatsApp audios he receives daily) on top of the images of the spaces he walks through every day in San Francisco. In Parole, streets, a station, the filmmaker's apartment, places he usually visits, his accidental encounter with a passerby... No matter where the camera places its gaze, it always apprehends an emptiness, a subtle aroma of loneliness, perhaps the nostalgia Ampudia speaks of, conveyed in views that are the filter of a sensibility that has not quite found fulfillment in his new residence. The mother's words sometimes interrupt this atmosphere of introspection; they are spoken from the incomprehension of love. And in this way Parole synthesizes the conflicts of those who leave and those who remain: the conflicts unleashed by the fracture of family affections. 

Heidi Hassan opts for a radically different angle: she confronts the romanticization of communist experiences. She judges those theme parks built by the Western market for the enjoyment of tourists who are unaware of the violence, the political repression and the miserable life experienced by the inhabitants of those totalitarian societies. She herself, exiled, is reduced to the exotic image made real by such pseudo-memorial gestures, a victim of their soothing ideology. Souvenir goes into the rooms of a museum that recreates a house in the German Democratic Republic and, while watching, Hassan is heard reflecting on the comfortable ignorance of realities such as Cuba's, where surveillance and control of life by the authorities pushes its citizens, at the very least, into exile.

The director of Dreams like Paper Boats (unlike the Cubans) looks, in essence, at the people who remain; he stages the breakdown of a Haitian family as a consequence of the abandonment and separation inherent to emigration. Broken families are the inevitable corollary of the act of leaving one's country of origin, whether motivated by dreams of economic betterment or for political reasons - this reality is transparent in Parole and in Smoke of the Fire. In Dreams like Paper Boats, in the absence of news from the mother, a father and his young daughter are plunged into grief. 

Meanwhile, Daryna Mamaisur's exercise in Smoke of the Fire distinguishes itself by addressing language as the core where a migrant lives her identity mismatch. Settled in Portugal, she tries to learn the language of this country while she is challenged by the threats of war in Ukraine. The photographs she receives from Kiev, drowned in darkness, emotions she cannot communicate in Portuguese. But she perseveres in the attempt, figuratively in the plastic countenance of this performative documentary, poetic at times. Perhaps Mamaisur knows - as her friend Violena Ampudia advised her friend - that if she wants to sow in this new land, she must know the plants that grow in it.

Only the moon will understand, Ramona (Victoria Linares Villegas, 2023) and Republic complete the program of competing titles. All three deal with the realities and conflicts of youth, a theme that is also touched upon in Parole, Petricor, Still Free, Three Promises and Smoke of the Fire. Kim Torres' film, Only the Moon Will Understand, spirals around adolescence, consummating a poetic evocation that dialogues with other films in the selection that also focus on memory. Its purpose seems to be to elucidate how we emotionally negotiate with our past. In a few minutes, the story models a dreamlike universe, undoubtedly emanating from the memories of those children we see frolicking, playing, running among the ruins of Manzanillo, a country town surrounded by rubble. The stylization of the photography stimulates the sensorial sense of the mise-en-scene, and purifies that recovered time of childhood, that time when they dreamed of escaping from a place forgotten by history.

All that lyricism fades in the stark images of Republic, a compelling testimony to the idealistic ravings of young people in Beijing. They articulate something quite close to a hippie community of communist ideas. They all gather in Eryang's small apartment, where they drink, do drugs, listen to Pink Floyd and The Beatles and discuss politics, social class and consumerism. Republic becomes so forceful because of the accurate way (visually and argumentatively) in which Jin Jiang documents a way of life and a way of thinking and lets the viewer see, in all its overwhelming dimension, the utopian nonsense of these boys. The rigor of the gaze, in a footage of about 107 minutes, lets us know that their behavior emanates both from a reactivity to China's coupling to the dynamics of capital and from an unhealthy relationship with the country's cultural memory, which can only lead to foolishness. They are also the corollary of a nation's historical journey. This existential mode is a little bit the current being of China as the fate of Kostya and Katya is a little bit the current being of Russia.

Ramona touches on a fragile subject: teenage pregnancy in peripheral areas of the Dominican Republic. But the film's value lies not in its denunciation of the situations experienced by these girls, whose childhoods are cut short by poverty, the cultural subordination of women and the lack of institutional policies, but in the meditation it proposes, from its narrative approach, on the difficulty of representing the subjectivities of these girls with the necessary ethical rigor. In a unique symbiosis of fiction and documentary, Ramona tells the adventure of a middle-class actress who must play the role of a pregnant teenager. To play the character, she visits a community and meets with several young women. Their testimonies remain in the film; they themselves evaluate certain fragments of the script and, finally, assume the character. The distance that Linares Villegas corroborates between the reality of the girls and their opinions about how they should be represented raises important questions about the eticity of any mise-en-scène.

Once again the INSTAR Film Festival proposes a body of films that x-ray several of the most urgent conflicts of the contemporary world; works resulting from ingenious aesthetic operations, far from the mania for cloning known formulas, and stimulated by the conviction that any expressive practice is exhausted in itself if it does not look at the problems of the world. These films are not about art as an instrument of politics, nor about art for art's sake. It is about art as a political end in itself. This principle somehow ensures that the films transcend the immediacy of the issues discussed and sustain their reflections over the specific circumstances.