El matadero (2021), the most recent film by Fernando Fraguela Fosado, is premiering these days at the INSTAR Film Festival. Organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism and the Cuban Cinema in Quarantine (CCC) project, this event kicked off its 2nd edition on December 4 and will run until December 11, with a varied program that includes the Cuban premiere of thirty-three films.

Fraguela Fosado's documentary is part of the section titled "La isla en peso" (The island in weight) —in frank homage to Virgilio Piñera—, where some "physical allegations about contemporary Cuba" are grouped, in which "political violence, material precariousness, frustration and idleness" are perceived as symptoms of a sick social body.

Certainly The Slaughterhouse is a political document. But its political condition is tied to the vigor of its aesthetic conception. Its expressive resources, the linguistic repertoire of the audiovisual with which the director operates, pursue a reconfiguration of the discourses and symbolic plots with which the image of the Revolution is presented. This is a creative gesture that mobilizes more than one director in contemporary Cuba, to the point of becoming a feature of cultural dominance that explains many of the audiovisual "forms" of the Cuban cinematographic landscape.

El matadero presents the failure of the revolutionary program, the demagogy of its triumphalist discourse, the precariousness to which the individual's daily life is subjected as a result of the economic conditions of a project of society in absolute decadence. But his gaze focuses -and it is here where the political gesture gains power- on the redoubts of subjectivity; he is inclined to contemplate the mark that failure has left on the family, on the world of individual affections, on the space of desires and expectations for the future.

In terms of filmmaking, Fraguela Fosado resorts to a narrative solution that has also become characteristic of contemporary Cuban documentaries: the emphasis on the self as the subject of enunciation. Everything we see on screen -reality and the world of others- is conditioned by the perceptions of a voice-over that exposes her personal setbacks, her inner world, her identity crises... And it is of little interest the dissimilar profiles from which reality and the existential circumstances addressed in the film can be interpreted or read; what really matters is the point of view, the look, the thought that this self tends to the world. The outside (the documented images, the archival photographs and videos, Fidel Castro's speeches) are motifs, objects, residues that explain the modeling of a being's identity, the state of an imaginary.

The film records the dynamics of a neighborhood in Pinar del Río, and focuses especially on Dusniel Pereda Pérez, Fraguela Fosado's childhood friend. The constant transition from general shots of the community - where one can observe the blocks of buildings that already metaphorize the petrification of the "new man" project - to close-ups and detail shots of the individuals, the environment and, above all, the pigsty where Dusniel spends his days, hoping to escape from the island, explain the director's allegorical will. The micro-world of the neighborhood - including its daily movements, which, although briefly, are well portrayed by the director - and Dusniel's particular destiny become a metaphor for the country as a whole.

Dusniel has an accentuated generic scope; more than his individuality, the film is interested in his social condition, his position in the historical behavior of Cuba... He is a resonant symbol of the disjunctions that currently mark the experiences of many young people, and of the not so young. Dusniel could be any Cuban immersed in an unfathomable crisis of future, convinced that there is no other possibility of life but to escape from the island.

As for the insightfulness with which Fraguela Fosado argues the decomposition of a country and its individuals, we should also highlight the photography that draws attention where he manages to extract from space a habitus, from the physical description of the environment an explanation of the state of life of the people. We rarely see faces in the film; when they appear, they are seen from a distance or against the light. Their bodies are enough, generic bodies of a country.

The superimposition of textures and audiovisual registers that the director weaves together is interesting. When commenting on Dusniel's attempts to escape the country by boat, he uses a group of images taken from a video game; these decisions - the ironic animated segments over Fidel's voice - emotionally characterize the anecdote referred to and bring expressive richness to the documentary, especially given the organicity with which the montage integrates them. Since the documentary is, strictly speaking, an intimate confession, the images are a corollary of the words, of the director's muffled voice that contrasts with Fidel's stentorian speeches.

Fraguela Fosado looks at the neighborhood, looks at Dusniel, to try to understand himself —military service, school activities, the eagerness to emigrate, material scarcity, are facets that have shaped his conscience. The slaughterhouse thus brings into circulation, once again, the devaluation of the individual and the existential crisis of youth, determining issues for today's Cuba.