Mondays are Día del Espectador (Moviegoer’s Day) at movie theaters in the Gràcia neighborhood in Barcelona. Tickets only cost 4 euros instead of 8. I’m not always able to go, but at the Verdi theater you can see works by the most interesting filmmakers from all across the cinematographic panorama. I’ve lived here for a year, and I haven’t seen a single Cuban film showing at any of the theaters. I’m not talking about showcases, tributes, or festivals financed by foundations or the Spanish Ministry of Culture; I’m talking about Cuban films acquired by a distribution company. When the day comes that I finally see a Cuban film at the Verdi, I will be very happy, but in the meantime, I wonder things like: What amino acids do we need so that someone from my generation, someone I know from Cuba, can sneak one of their films into that distribution circuit? This question somehow leads to talking about something that I do not particularly enjoy being: “a Cuban filmmaker.” 

Alejandro Brugués once said in an interview that while all his colleagues were watching and analyzing films by Tarkovski, he was only watching and analyzing films by Spielberg. Brugués is a Cuban filmmaker that has made a career in Los Angeles directing horror films. This observation intrigued me. I don’t know if he said it tongue in cheek because he felt alone as a genre filmmaker, or if he said it based on some unknown element in which I was not yet well-versed, something that needed time to reveal itself to me.

Even though I am a fan of Tarkovski, the same thing that used to happen to Brugués used to happen to me. I would tell myself that my true origin lay in Spielberg. This reflection helps me think about the question of origin, the question of identity. When it comes to vocation, I’ve tried to focus on where I come from and maintain a sense of my roots. You could say that, with the first quality stories I heard, I came from a faraway place, from Snow White, Tom Thumb, and Meñique, the fable by José Martí. Then, as my complexity grew, I felt that I came from Hemingway, Tolstoy, and Balzac. 

Nevertheless, I am, or was, a Cuban filmmaker. The label “Cuban filmmaker” contains two words; one that is chosen, and one that is not. And that’s where I think identity lies. Gender identity issues have given us a valuable lesson on the topic: one is what one feels-one-is. One is born with a sex they don’t choose, and they can rebel against it. It’s foolish to tell a trans woman that she is not a woman. This is nothing new. The fact that one is two meters and fifteen centimeters tall doesn’t mean they have to be a basketball player or an athlete.

Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet that fled the Soviet communist regime to live in exile in the United States, used to say that when those who believe in a free society and love the culture of freedom nurtured by the West enter into exile there, they look for the freedom they were chasing, since they feel like they have finally come home. Therefore, it may be that one does not choose to be Cuban, because we do not choose where we are born, but one does choose to make films or write scripts, which has nothing to do with Cuba.

When I was living in Cuba, it made me uncomfortable when people would use terms like “films from the provinces.” To me, it felt like an exclusionary and provincial way of thinking. It was as if there was an inability to come up with another way of categorizing films. I did not set out to make films from the provinces; no one does. And, of course, no one would go see those films.

I feel the same way when I am categorized as a Cuban filmmaker. What does it mean to make Cuban films? Stories that talk about Fidel, “the happiest country in the world,” poverty, and political prisoners? Films about the true story behind something, that expose the false image sold about Cuba, etc.? I’m not interested in that type of filmmaking. They’re the kinds of films you watch one day when you get home late, half-drunk, and when you can’t sleep you turn on the TV and watch whatever happens to be on.

Nevertheless, being a “Cuban filmmaker” is all that’s left of what I was in Cuba. And I realized it when I received the invitation to write a piece for this dossier. This invitation is the only thing keeping me in this career where I am referred to as a “filmmaker.” The fact that people remember me as being a part of Cuban cinema is perhaps the last remaining memory of my career as a filmmaker. It’s enough to make you cry. 

There are no funds to finance Cuban films made outside Cuba. Cuban cinema was, is, and will continue to be made using government funds from Cuba, or from the Netherlands, Norway, France, or the United States, even when these governments are against the Cuban dictatorship. By design, Cuban cinema is the result of government institutions in conflict. In other words, it is the result of power divided into opposing sides. 

This is why the idea of auteur filmmaking seems dangerous to me. It’s presumed to come out of a feverish state of inspiration, which is what Cuba is: an anomaly, an intellectual fever that leads to auteur outputs. Cuban cinema has not been able to take down the Revolution and the figure of Fidel Castro, so the audiences that go see Cuban films will be looking for news of Fidel and the Revolution. It is a cinema with roots and a dismal future steeped in political favoritism. 

If I could take over the controls and turn off the way of categorizing that remembers me as a Cuban filmmaker, I would finally be “nothing” or “nobody.” And I like that, because it’s what I’m striving to be in Barcelona right now: nobody. Joseph Brodsky also talked about this. About the fear, the terror of disappearing, the terror of being anonymous, of being nothing or nobody, that a person feels living in exile. That’s why I don’t like using the word exile for myself, because it comes with that fear tattooed on it.

Apparently, I feel the same thing when I see showcases of films made by women, or feminist cinema, or films by Black directors, or Caribbean cinema, or political films. The same thing does not happen, for example, when you go see Romanian films, because you know that it’s not Romania that you’re interested in, but rather the power of the narratives. I believe Cuban cinema should stop being Cuban and set off in search of a source of inspiration where it no longer matters if it is Cuban or not. It has to engage, like it or not, in that pitiful and poignant struggle against what it was always told it had to be.

Picasso didn’t have the answer about the massacre in Guernica. Writers and philosophers, even though they speak confidently without a shred of doubt, are not the Christ-like figures we think they are. They’re just people that do despicable things and cowards that hold grudges like the rest of us. We can’t ask cinema to be more than what it is, either.

Carlos Melián is an independent filmmaker and journalist. His most recent short film, El rodeo (The Rodeo), premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2021. He wrote the script for the short film Tundra (2021, directed by José Luis Aparicio), selected for Sundance and Locarno, and the feature-length documentary Mafifa (2021, directed by Daniela Muñoz), which premiered at the IDFA Luminous section. His writing has appeared in magazines including El Estornudo and Periodismo de Barrio.