It was December 2019 and the artist Tania Bruguera opened her house in Old Havana to welcome the public at the first edition of the INSTAR film festival, organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), which Bruguera herself founded four years ago. before for “the promotion of civic literacy and social justice in Cuba.” But there was no audience, no one occupied the seats in the small movie theater, except the directors themselves or the Institute's work team. “There was almost no one, at that time people were very afraid to go to INSTAR,” says Bruguera, one of the most prominent Cuban artists who once had the dream of being a film director. Today, the festival that was born to support and accompany young and independent Cuban cinema has become cross-border and received more than 3,000 film proposals willing to compete in its fifth edition.

Bruguera calls it “being persistent.” In the second edition of the event - which is held every year and has been in the crosshairs of the Cuban political police - the film exhibition was held online, due to the coronavirus pandemic. In the summer of 2022, its headquarters was Documenta15 in Kassel, one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in the world, where the INSTAR Film Festival participated with the screening of more than 160 films, to date the largest retrospective of alternative Cuban cinema. In the midst of the political and economic crisis in Cuba, and the harassment by the Government that activists, artists or filmmakers have faced, creators have not been left out of the historic exodus that is taking place in the country. Since then, the festival, which continues to highlight the independent production of Cuban filmmakers, has opted to be an “increasingly inclusive and international” event, according to José Luis Aparicio, filmmaker and artistic director of the festival.

In this fifth edition, which will run from October 28 to November 3, 21 of the 37 films in the program are works produced by Cuban filmmakers, emigrants or residents on the island. The festival - which awards the Nicolás Guillén Landrián prize to the work that best covers a taboo topic in its society and the P. M. Fund for independent Cuban audiovisuals - did not stop being a Cuban space, but rather began to be “itinerant and transnational”, in the words of its director.

“It seemed essential to us to establish a dialogue between independent Cuban cinema and the cinematography of regions also plagued by dictatorships and authoritarianism, where the production of free and alternative cinema is difficult, since artists face reprisals similar to those we face in Cuba. : censorship, repression and forced exile,” says Aparicio. Today the festival features works from countries such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, Iran, Haiti, China, Hong Kong, Palestine, Ukraine, Russia, Haiti, Croatia, Guinea-Bissau, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica.

For Bruguera, this opening means that “Cuba began to dialogue with its peers.” “We Cubans have to understand that solidarity is two-sided. You can't ask for solidarity if you are not supportive. One thing that I am very interested in at INSTAR is creating dialogues between different but similar situations, to see if once and for all Cuba can enter that list of international dictatorships. And to understand what other solutions other places have, how they handle it,” the artist insists.

This year the festival will have physical screenings in Barcelona, ​​Berkeley, Madrid, Munich and Paris. In Cuba, the public will be able to access it from the Festhome online platform, a possibility that is accompanied by uncertainty about how many people will be able to participate or use such an expensive Internet service to have a presence at the festival.

“It is surprising when access from Cuba exceeds expectations,” says Aparicio. “Last year there were more than a hundred views, which do not seem like many at first glance, but we know how difficult it is, not only because of economic and technological issues, but also because of what it means to set aside time in the middle of the tortuous “island reality, plagued by power outages and endless lines to buy food or take the bus or get medicine, to see independent or auteur films, like the one we propose at the festival.”

The director, however, considers that on the Island “there is an audience very avid for cinema, always willing to reflect and aesthetic experience. Viewers who want to encounter images and sounds of their country and the world, even if it is on the screens of their mobile phones or computers. As long as there is a viewer in Cuba who wants to see the films of our festival, or the debates and conservatories that we organize online, this gesture will make sense for us.”

As part of the novelties of this fifth edition is the launch of the first issue of the annual magazine Fantasma Material, in collaboration with the Rialta Ediciones label, which will take place on October 26 at the Cineteca Madrid. “For a long time, in conversations with filmmakers and critics friends, we felt the absence of a film magazine conceived by those people who were collectively making and thinking about the new cinema of the island,” explains Aparicio. “Like the festival itself, we are interested in reflecting on cinema that is produced in authoritarian or dictatorial contexts, in areas where freedom of expression is restricted. Also those cinematographies from the global south that are now in full development and exploration of their creative possibilities.”

There are other spaces to support and make Cuban independent cinema visible, such as the Cuban Diaspora Film Archive, organized from Miami by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida and Santiago Juan Navarro. Exhibitions, talks and events are also frequently held with Cuban film production as a central theme. From state institutions there are spaces such as the Havana International Film Festival and the Gibara Festival that have historically been criticized for the censorship of their programs and the restrictions on admitting certain works or filmmakers. In 2020, the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry suspended the Young Show, a space that hosted the works of filmmakers at the beginning of their careers, and which fueled the debate in a country and an institution with notorious cases of censorship.

“Within the Island the panorama is more bleak,” says Aparicio. “Although some independent films are shown at state festivals, these are spaces where censorship of the most frontal artistic and political visions prevails.”

He also says that “there are few pockets of freedom in alternative spaces” and these “usually have a short life due to government pressure and precariousness.” However, “all these spaces, those that existed before and those that will emerge in the future, are fundamental,” says the director of the INSTAR Film Festival. “The only way to resist and, eventually, overcome the onslaught of Cuban censorship, repression and institutional apathy is to create our own platforms, with filmmakers, critics, curators and cultural managers inside and outside the island. Weave networks, forge alliances, break the centralized and monolithic logic of the cultural ecosystem in which we grew up. For this reason, there should not be a single festival, nor a single film magazine, nor a single fund to promote production, nor a single way of producing, thinking, imagining our films.”

Today Cuban cinema goes beyond the limits of the Island. It is diasporic, like its audience. Beyond the economic crisis in the country, many filmmakers have decided to choose the path of emigration due to excessive censorship by cultural authorities. “When independent Cuban cinema reached a stage of aesthetic maturity and greater productive independence, it was forced to disband and rethink itself in the open air of exile,” says Aparicio.

But filmmakers avoid making separations between cinema made inside or outside the Island, because these processes are nothing more than the natural result that Cuban society goes through transversally. Filmmakers like Aparicio prefer to call it “a cinema of Greater Cuba,” appropriating the term from the Cuban-American thinker Ana López.

“Cuban cinema is increasingly transnational, both in its productive logic and in its thematic and aesthetic searches,” he says. “It is true that, especially in the last five years, a large number of Cuban filmmakers have emigrated, among them some of the most significant voices in recent Cuban audiovisuals, but films continue to be produced on the island as worthy of attention as those that are done outside. What I do consider very stimulating are the new expressive paths that this dispersion, that these processes of personal and artistic reinvention that the migrant goes through, open up for the Cuban cinema of the future.”