Yesterday I saw a film that kept me awake at night. It is the film Quiero hacer una película, made by Yimit Ramírez and a team of intrepid Cuban filmmakers.

I am not in a position right now to write a review of the film. Especially because it is so complex, intelligent and original that to do so would require a second viewing. This, however, does not prevent me from thinking that my future as a filmmaker, and that of so many others who like me have launched or have been launched into the void at the moment when they were reaching their best definition, depends on the fate of this exceptional debut by Ramirez.

Quiero hacer una película is a fundamentally transgressive work and, as such, an exercise in extreme freedom and courage. You don't have to live in Cuba or know Yimit personally (as is my case) to understand that his film is the manifesto of his honesty as an artist and, incidentally, the manifesto of an entire generation of Cubans. I don't want to be hyperbolic, but I can't find another work in the national filmography -institutional and/or independent- that in that sense equals it.

Yimit has given us, without fuss or false poeticization, a film that emulates Jean Luc Godard's Breathless, one of the starting points of the French New Wave. Playing with the two terms most used by post-revolutionary cultural power and critics, always in a hurry to specify a "must be" for national cinema, this film is responsibly irresponsible.

Ramírez tells an exciting love story in his first feature film. Those who do not understand it this way and prefer to classify it as a politically inconvenient film or a porn film, have multiple reasons to do so. There is no love (or friendship) story in national cinema that has not needed ideological, moralistic or instructive alibis to justify its romantic essence.

With less than what Ramírez achieved in QHUP, the French-Argentinean Gaspar Noé has reached the "Olympus" of Cannes more than once, and with it he has achieved universal spaces for a more innovative and risky cinema, both from the conceptual and formal point of view.  

But it happens that the context in which the film takes place is today's Cuba, full of problems, contradictions, polarizations; a reality that seems to many as a labyrinth with no way out. It also happens that one of the characters in the story, the co-protagonist anti-hero, has negative opinions about the "apostle of the homeland". And it happens, finally, that the antihero, in his passion for filming what happens around him, surprises Cubans by expressing controversial opinions during real events, such as Obama's visit, the Rolling Stones concert, or the announcement of Fidel Castro's death at a public event.

All these elements have been enough to ostracize the film and, most likely, to turn Yimit into a stinker. Apparently, our cultural promoters ignore an elementary maxim: a work is not "classified" by the "morsels" a character says. They also seem to forget that a monarchist Balzac was considered by Marx as the most perfect of historians. Thus, instead of celebrating his birth, Cuban official institutions have decided to condemn the most important filmic work of recent national production to death.

On the other shore, in the second most populated city by Cubans, the film is so far suffering the same punishment. In times when I was the artistic director of the Tower Theater in Miami, the film and its authors would have enjoyed a grand premiere and a wide commercial exhibition. This was the case with another notable work, Santa y Andrés, by Carlos Lechuga.

Perhaps the reasons for the silence in Miami are the Covid-19 pandemic, or the intensification of sanctions against the Cuban population, which is itching and spreading. Hopefully it is not that the Film Festival and the Tower Theater, both under the wings of Miami Dade College, now prefer to promote political pamphlets without artistic merit to satisfy the tastes and sensibilities of the part of the Cuban exile community that still controls the ideological helm of the city.

What would Martí say if he found out that in order to preserve his honor, the Cuban public is being prevented from enjoying the best female performance that Cuban cinema has ever produced? What would he say if he knew that a decision on the part of alienated promoters is blocking the way to the most original filmmaker of the moment?

The censorship's blow not only goes through the censored work, it goes through the soul of its creator from one side to the other. I say this from experience. It is a wound that rarely heals.

Yesterday, when I was halfway through the movie, I felt fear. Fear of the emptiness in which our lives can end. And I stopped the movie. I got up and went to get some water. I was out of breath, like in Godard's title. And I felt envy, heartbreaking envy. Yimit, in ninety minutes loaded with subtle suggestions, dramaturgical wisdom, sharp direction of actors and overflowing courage, without intending to, had taught me what I should have always known: that only by gambling everything for everything can one conquer that mystery that is called art.

Like resentment, envy is an inevitable feeling. But no envy is healthy. Therefore, the only thing left for me and all those who have been shaken by Ramirez's film to do is to put on the electrodes and give ourselves an electroshock; that is, if we still have time.

Sometimes in the afternoons, when I write the script that will supposedly take me back to fiction cinema, I have the feeling that, more than an act of creation, it is a therapy session. After watching I Want to Make a Movie, however, I can't give a second more to that pessimism. If I really need to go back to filming, I have to do it, even if I have to hide under a bed like Tony, the film's character.

I paraphrase again (and I apologize if it seems like a lesson): a republic is not founded like a camp, a republic does not grow by asking its artists to wear uniforms, a republic perishes if the screens of art are darkened.

Thank you, Yimit Ramírez. Thank you Neisy Alpízar. Thank you, Tony Alonso. For stealing my heart.