The fourth edition of the INSTAR film Festival has announced an ambitious program that will bring more than a dozen independent Cuban audiovisual films to eight major cities around the world, this time focusing on the work of exiled artists.

The festival, to be held from December 4 to 10 in movie theaters and cultural centers in Barcelona, Paris, Miami, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Sao Paulo, can be watched online from Cuba through the Festhome platform.

This edition of the event will be inaugurated on December 4 at the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), with a lecture by Cuban critic and journalist Dean Luis Reyes and the screening of the feature-length documentary ‘Option Zero’, by Marcel Beltrán, selected in several international festivals, which gives voice to Cubans who have emigrated through the dangerous route of the Darien Gap, between Colombia and Panama.

The program also includes the feature films ‘Calls from Moskow’ (Luis Alejandro Yero, 2023); ‘A Man under His Influence’ (Emmanuel Martín, 2023), ‘Mafifa’ (Daniela Muñoz Barroso, 2021), and Veritas (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2022).

They are joined by ‘Abyssal’ (Alejandro Alonso, 2021), ‘Road of lava’ (Gretel Marín Palacio, 2023), ‘The Rodeo’ (Carlos Melián Moreno, 2021), ‘The Pure Ones’ (Carla Valdés León, 2021), ‘Women Dreaming a Nation’ (Fernando Fraguela Fosado, 2023) and ‘Taxibol’ (Tommaso Santambrogio, 2023).

Along with this selection of works by Cuban filmmakers or made in Cuba by foreign filmmakers, pieces by a handful of exiled non-Cuban artists will also participate: ‘Agwe’ (Samuel Suffren, Haiti), ‘And How Miserable is the Home of Evil’ (Saleh Kashefi, Iran), ‘Leaves of K.’ (Gloria Carrión Fonseca, Nicaragua) and ‘Windows’ (Jhon Ciavaldini, Venezuela).

The INSTAR Film Festival is an annual event organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), a collective founded and directed by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, and curated by filmmaker José Luis Aparicio.

According to its guidelines, "the exhibition favors audiovisuals with daring aesthetic and thematic proposals, as well as hybrid pieces that explore new paths in filmmaking”.

The concept guiding the current edition is the transnational nature of the New Cuban Cinema and its growing dialogue with diverse cinematographies, especially those of countries also ruled by authoritarian governments.

In addition to the CCCB in Barcelona, the venues for the screenings include the Zumzeig Cinecooperativa theater in the Spanish city. Other venues include the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires; the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City; Florida International University (FIU) in Miami; e-flux Screening Room in New York; the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris, and the Cinemateca Brasileira and Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of Sao Paulo (MAC USP), in the Brazilian city.

The festival will have an international jury that will award the PM Nicolás Guillén Landrián Prize to the Cuban or non-Cuban film that best reflects a taboo subject. Its members are Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Brazilian critic and historian and one of the authorities on Latin American cinema; Dunja Fehimović, an academic specializing in Caribbean cinema and university professor in the United Kingdom; and Cuban screenwriter Alejandro Hernández, winner of the 2013 Goya Award for All Women, by Spanish filmmaker Mariano Barroso.