“Cuba: visions of a fragmented island” is the title of a showcase of independent Cuban cinema that will be exhibited at Casa de America, Madrid, on September 18, and is composed of four short films produced between 2023 and 2024.

The selection includes films by Cuban filmmakers based in Spain: Souvenir (Heidi Hassan), La historia se escribe de noche (Alejandro Alonso), El espacio roto (Gabriel Alemán, Eduardo Eimil) and Cuatro hoyos (Daniela Muñoz).

The program, curated by Cuban filmmaker Jose Luis Aparicio, is part of the space “No por corto menos cine”, dedicated to that audiovisual format and regularly organized by the institution, which belongs to the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“To approach today's Cuba is to find a country hidden beyond its geographical limits. The shorts that make up this session, all of them premiered during the last year, are just four splinters of a national landscape that is becoming more complex and fragmented every day,” says the program of the selection.

“Using very different cinematographic strategies (the self-referential essay of Souvenir; the experimental dystopia of La historia se escribe de noche; the genre fiction of El espacio roto; the interactive documentary in the key of comedy of Cuatro hoyos), these works explore essential issues of the contemporary Cuban experience: the acute social and political crisis the country is going through; the ideological fetishism regarding the Cuban Revolution; the crisis of values within the family; emigration and the unsuspected encounters it brings about,” it adds.

According to Aparicio, the screening is also “a new opportunity to appreciate the richness and inventiveness of Cuban independent cinema”, while it is “a preview of the film program of the V INSTAR Film Festival, which will take place from October 28 to November 3 in multiple cities around the world, including Madrid and Barcelona”.

Souvenir, the return to filmmaking of Heidi Hassan, winner of the award with Patricia Pérez for her feature film A media voz (2019), states in its synopsis: “Fascinated tourists stroll through the museum dedicated to the memory of the GDR (the extinct German Democratic Republic) as if it were an amusement park, indifferent to the painful stories that took place under the communist regime. Their carefree attraction to vintage, their comfortable forgetfulness and their need for utopia make them naïve accomplices of the current Cuban reality”.

Hassan has defined this 11-minute piece as “a melancholic cry that denounces poverty and repression in Cuba, directed towards those who justify the regime's failures”.

For its part, La historia se escribe de noche has a plot that could be summarized as follows: “A major blackout has plunged Cuba into darkness. In the streets, the inhabitants try to escape the gloom while the fires of the bonfires seem to announce the end of an era. Taking refuge inside our house, my mother tells me about a vision that has been tormenting her for years”.

As for El espacio roto, a short fiction film with a cast that includes Delvys Fernández, Osvaldo Doimeadiós, Beatriz Viña, Brayan Alejandro Hevia and Belissa Cruz, it revolves around the discovery of an audio recording with the voice of José Martí.

Finally, Cuatro hoyos follows Pepe, an elderly Spaniard who has improvised his own golf course on the outskirts of Madrid. Daniela, a young filmmaker, discovers his routine as she tries to portray him. Both have hearing loss. On the edge of a space doomed to disappear, the camera translates this unlikely “dialogue of the deaf”. Two very different generations and cultures meet here through film.

About the project, Daniela Muñoz, its director, said: “I have a progressive loss of high-pitched sounds. I don't hear birds or whistles or rain. My hearing loss has been changing the way I perceive reality and relate to others. A couple of years ago I came to live in Madrid. Finding José and his golf course in the middle of a vacant lot, and discovering that he couldn't hear me well either, awakened an irremediable interest in staying, keeping him company and trying to listen to him. Cuatro hoyos is the first film I've made outside Cuba: the portrait of an encounter.

The film program will be screened on Wednesday, September 18, 2024 at 6:30PM in the Iberia Room, Casa de América's cinema, with free admission until seating capacity of 50 seats is reached. Tickets will be distributed one hour before the screening begins.

At the end of the screening, there will be a Q&A with the filmmakers.

In June 2023, Casa de América organized the exhibition “Cuban Independent Cinema: New Imaginaries”, which ran for a month and became one of the largest and most representative selections of audiovisual works from the island in recent years.

The curatorship on that occasion included the fictions Gloria eterna (Yimit Ramírez, 2018); El rodeo (Carlos Melián, 2021) and Tundra (José Luis Aparicio, 2021); as well as the documentaries La opción cero (Marcel Beltrán, 2020); Petricor (Violena Ampudia, 2022); Los puros (Carla Valdés León, 2020); Umbra (Daniela Muñoz, 2021); Home (Alejandro Alonso, 2019) and Los perros de Amundsen (Rafael Ramírez, 2017).