Sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR) and the independent project "Cuban Cinema in Quarantine," the second edition of the INSTAR Film Festival is announced from December 4 to 11. Running parallel to the Havana International Film Festival, which is organized by the ICAIC authorities, this alternative event will take place this year almost entirely online and proposes a program comprising 11 thematic cycles, a retrospective dedicated to Manuel Marzel and three special presentations.   

Divided into seven sections, the INSTAR Film Festival will host 41 films, 33 of which will be Cuban, two of them films censored in Cuba: Yimit Ramirez's Quiero hacer una película and Miguel Coyula's Blue Heart, which will compete as a "special presentation", as well as the multi-award-winning A media voz (Heidi Hassan and Patricia Perez). The foreign films to be screened are from Mexico, Dominican Republic, Colombia and Spain. The sections into which the Festival will be divided are called "La isla en peso", "Mal de archivo", "Derivas Queer", "La otra Cuba", "Cine-performance", "Márgenes", "Así de simple" and "Foco-Latinoamérica". And 33 films will be presented for the first time on the island.

"Two of the films exhibited in this edition -adds the note published on INSTAR's Facebook page- have been supported by the PM Fund for audiovisuals of Cuba, in the category of short fiction: Hora azul (Zoe García, PM Award 2018) and New Eva (Natalí Cardet, PM Award 2019)."

The Festival will also include a theoretical part with five talks on Cuban cinema and migration, distribution of Cuban cinema, gender cinema in Latin America and the Caribbean, and "Queereme mucho" (Cuban audiovisual on gender and divergent identities). There will be a conversation between Swiss artist Milo Rau and Cuban artist Tania Bruguera entitled "The trace of the document" and another one with Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacio on his work.

Two workshops complete the list of INSTAR Film Festival activities: one on video-mapping and another called "Deconstructing the Visual Archive of a Community," which will be in alliance with the German organization HKW and its New Alphabet School #ContructingCommunity.

Festival organizers invite the public from inside the island to join the online experience by sending a note to festivalinstar@gmail.com including in the body of the mail your full name, your province and municipality of residence, and a Cuban cell phone number, to be able to guide you. In the subject line you should write "I want to attend". For more information, please visit INSTAR's Facebook page.