One of the novelties of the 5th edition of the INSTAR Film Festival is the launching of the first issue of the magazine Fantasma Material, a project undertaken between the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR) and Rialta Ediciones. This was announced by the organizers of the event -which this year will take place from October 28 to November 4- in the days in which its current call for papers was announced. This Saturday, October 26, critic Dean Luis Reyes and filmmaker José Luis Aparicio, editors of the new publication, will meet at the Cineteca de Madrid to present the inaugural issue of the project to the public. The launching of Fantasma Material will be accompanied by a special screening of Mafifa (2021), a documentary by Daniela Muñoz, winner of the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award at the fourth edition of the festival.

Fantasma Material comes as another forceful gesture of INSTAR in its purpose to support, disseminate and explore the Cuban cinema of the present, especially that forged within the independent movement, scattered in indistinct geographies of the world and threatened on the island by political censorship and the obsolescence of the official film industry. The name of the magazine pays a well-deserved tribute to the book The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (1998), by Cuban critic Gilberto Pérez (Cuba, 1942-United States, 2015), whose thoughts accompany the magazine's vision. At a time when there is no specialized media that follows the routes of Cuban independent cinema -increasingly avant-garde in expressive terms and, at the same time, produced in quite anomalous circumstances-, this publication promises to accompany and dimension from now on the images forged by that movement or that transnational community, as well as to explore the processes and conditions that make it possible and outline its face.

In this sense, Fantasma Material provides a new space to think and generate knowledge about Cuban cinema as a whole. With an annual periodicity, the magazine will be published in each edition of the event and will be available in both physical and digital format.

Of course, this first issue will also have an online launch, next Monday 28th, during the opening of the event, which will be broadcast on INSTAR's social networks. Nils Longueira Borrego, critic, researcher and member of the magazine's editorial board, will be in charge of the presentation, and will take the opportunity to talk with its editors about the conception of the first issue.

“The idea of calling the magazine Fantasma Material was Jose Luis Aparicio's,” comments Dean Luis Reyes in conversation with Rialta Noticias, urged to offer some previews of this first issue. “At Documenta 15, in Kassel, Germany -where INSTAR, curated by Aparicio himself, organized the mega Cuban film show “Land Without Images” in 2022-, Rafael Ramirez made reference to Gilberto Perez's book. Tania Bruguera and José Luis were interested in the subject. I thought it was a brilliant idea that the magazine should be called that, so I agreed. I read Perez's book years ago, when I worked at the EICTV [International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños], but I'm aware that his thought and figure are very remote for film people on the island, including critics.”

One of the proposals of this initial issue is precisely “a Spanish translation, made especially for the magazine, of the first chapter of the influential book by Gilberto Perez”, preceded by “an essay written at our request by Adrian Martin, one of the most important film critics and thinkers of that art of the present, which aims to comment on the current thinking of that author”.

Reyes stresses that “the purpose of invoking Perez is to disseminate his work in Cuba, if possible, but also to articulate his very particular notion of cinema to the critical bet we make in the issue. For Pérez, cinema is a phantasmatic co-presence that permeates dreams, projects, human actions in conscious existence. He is also an author who argued with the academization of thought on cinema brought by structuralism and was very close to an exercise of criticism that claims to return to the object, to the film, to its diverse conditions of creation, without imposing on it preconceived ideologies of a theoretical nature. There is no model closer to the one we want to exercise in Fantasma Material, which rather than paying homage, wants to resort to a thought that is a starting point to define the diffuse audiovisual forms that interest us”.

Cuban cinema is thought of today in its differentiating confrontation with the institutionalized tradition promoted by the ICAIC (with an often overly ideologized aesthetic). It is read from its insertion in the global panorama, where it is besieged by a voracious industry. At other times, it is approached from its intrinsic deterritorialization, conditioned at times by its existence in a fragmented diaspora. Sometimes it is approached from its recurrence to all kinds of aesthetic criteria capable of materializing creative imaginaries, indifferent to a nationally motivated language, although, in general, interested in a political form attentive to their realities. All these vectors of analysis, and many others, are dealt with in Fantasma Material, which -as the author of El gobierno de mañana. La invención del cine cubano independiente (2001-2015) - “tries to express a diffuse state of contemporary cinema for which there are still no definitive categories”.

The magazine would then turn out to be a sort of mirror where that “displaced [Cuban] production, delocalized, or made from national contexts, but outside the taxonomies of national cinema” is recognized, stresses Reyes: “this is, to a large extent, the current state of Cuban cinema, created outside the country, detached from the localized thematic obsession, less and less determined by ‘Cuban’ sociological and anthropological marks”.

“Fantasma Material”, adds the film critic, ”seeks to discourse about a cinema that aspires to formal and discursive independence, without attachment to any symbolic institutionality, identified with the search for the expressive sovereignty of the creator. And, since the above points to the need for freedom, we speak in the magazine to a large extent of a cinema that has traces or dialogues with socio-political contexts where there is a limitation of rights, especially those of expression. In this respect, the magazine coincides with the identity of the INSTAR Festival, in my opinion. It is enough to review the pieces curated there to understand that these three aforementioned features are detectable in most of them”.

In addition to the essays by Gilberto Perez and Adrian Martin, this first issue of the magazine will propose a couple of dossiers: “one gathers eleven texts by critics, academics, scholars and active filmmakers, which has the pretension of specifying the features that characterize current Cuban cinema (a group of ideas aspires to open a conversation that must start somewhere, and that we hope will continue in other spaces),” explains Reyes; ”the second is dedicated to Nicolás Guillén Landrián: there are four essays on the filmmaker, by Rafael Rojas, Ruth Goldberg, Néstor Díaz de Villegas and Ernesto Daranas.”

Guillén Landrián is a key figure in understanding the relationship independent creators aspire to maintain with the national tradition. For Reyes, author of La mirada bajo asedio -a sharp book on the director of Coffea arabiga-, “his very presence [in the magazine] invokes the idea of the material ghost: a repertoire rescued from oblivion, a cursed filmmaker that the generation of young filmmakers of the 2000s exhumed and transformed into a contemporary, perhaps the most influential poetics of Cuban cinema in the 21st century. Precisely the photo on the cover of this issue, in which Landrián crosses the waters of the Toa during the shooting of Ociel del Toa, treated as a heat map or a thermographic record, wants to invoke that flight of spectra that the magazine seeks to apprehend, explain, define. A material ghost, essentially”.

This No. 1 of the film magazine closes “with a project-manifesto written by six hands, in which Rafael Ramírez, Oderay Ponce de León and Carlos Terán define a project based on the idea of the hauntological, that concept of Derrida's that comes from Marx to examine the ghostly presence of the past. In other words, the “disturbing zone where time collapses and our past memories and associations haunt our minds, like a ghost,” as defined by Alasdair Macintyre”.

Tania Bruguera and Carlos Aníbal Alonso, directors and executive producers, lead the Fantasma Material project. “With them we cooked up our editing ideas, they are the backbone of a terrific editorial team that each contributed a vision that flowed as if we were all governed by a single rationality. It was great to discover that each professional (translator, editor, designers) made the original idea grow,” says Dean Luis Reyes.

“The fundamental desire in all this is to try to define where we come from in order to imagine where to go,” the editor concludes. “Cubans seem to have to close chapters all the time and start writing from scratch, in that unhealthy obsession for transcendence, but also to reach a backwater to live a life without the shocks of history, ideologies, caudillos. We locate two starting points here (Pérez and Landrián), and from them we trace two vanishing points without a definitive vertex, like a map of an imaginary territory that we wish to exist”.