“Cuban Cinema Without Borders “ is the film exhibition that the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), a cultural institution belonging to the University of California, will host in the United States from October 23 to November 16.

Sponsored by the INSTAR Film Festival and the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, which organizes it, as well as by the Department of Film and Media of the University of California at Berkeley, this is the first exhibition of its kind in that referential institution of the U.S. West Coast, which will showcase works of the new Cuban independent cinema unknown there, where Cuba is an object of academic study generally disconnected from the current situation of its culture.

Cuban filmmaker Lazaro Gonzalez (Villa Rosa, Sexilio), who studies in Berkeley, was in charge of curating an exhibition that offers the vision of his generation of filmmakers on national cinema. For him, the central criteria of the selection are, apart from offering unknown titles for local viewers and recent productions, to escape from the Cuban question as something exceptional.

“I think the fundamental purpose behind all this is to make today's contemporary Cuban cinema, independent cinema, at least the works that I think are more interesting, more visible. I think that also in the background there is a very marked intention not only to make this cinema visible, which is a bit on the margins of the U.S. academy and more consolidated film spaces in the United States, but also to break some of the imaginaries that persist about Cuban society and the Cuban revolution,” Gonzalez told DIARIO DE CUBA. 

“The fact of being in a place like Berkeley, which is this elite university, which boasts of being the most liberal university, the most progressive, and where there is all this, as defined by philosopher Wendy Brown, 'melancholy on the left', implies that it is always interesting when you talk about the Cuban issue, because there is a group of people who have no idea of what is happening in Cuba and do not believe in the criteria of the few Cubans who are here,” he warns.

Therefore, exhibiting together five of the recently restored documentaries by Nicolás Guillén Landrián with Landrián (Ernesto Daranas, 2023), feature-length fiction films like La mujer salvaje ( Alan González, 2023), filmed on the island, or Llamadas desde Moscú ( Luis Alejandro Yero, 2023), vetoed in his country, or those by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, means putting into circulation a new cinephilia that better explains the Cuba of the past 20 years.

“That is connected to breaking with this illusion, with this mirage, this utopia and what Cuba represents as that imaginary beacon of the Latin American left. Because I have been able to perceive in other curatorial exhibitions I have done here that there is always a desire to get closer to Cuba, but they are still connected to a Cuba linked to the ICAIC of the 1960s,” Gonzalez points out.

To illustrate the above, the curator points out that the BAMPFA often exhibits the films of Landrián, together with those of Santiago Álvarez, or Strawberry and Chocolate ( 1993) and In a Certain Way ( Sara Gómez, 1975). And when Lázaro proposed the show, the first suggestion was to make a selection more “attached to the classics”, so to speak, "That is precisely an attempt against the classics. 

“That is precisely against my principles and against my policies at the moment, and I think that is part of the justification why I want to do the show. And when I talk about policies I mean curatorial policies, because I think we share the notion that Cuban cinema today has become much more global, that it is produced on many occasions from the diaspora, from exile, and that multi-locality of contemporary Cuban cinema is what I was most interested in highlighting in broad strokes.

For example, in the introductory note to one of the programs of short films that make up “Cuban Cinema Without Borders” González emphasizes that these pieces explore “Cuba's culture of resistance”. And the selection brings together to prove it Now! (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2016); Casa de la noche ( Marcel Beltrán, 2016); Tundra (José Luis Aparicio, 2021); Persona (Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, 2019) and Hapi Berdey Yusimí in Yur Dey (Ana A. Alpízar, 2021), the latter, the only one of the group made in the US.

Then, speaking of the transnational situation of current Cuban cinema and the exilic that runs through it, there are Angela (Juan Pablo Daranas Molina, USA, 2018); Souvenir (Heidi Hassan, Spain, 2023); Petricor (Violena Ampudia, Belgium, 2022); Parole (Lázaro González, USA, 2024), and La historia se escribe de noche ( Alejandro Alonso, Cuba, France, 2024).

Mafifa (Daniela Muñoz Barroso, Cuba, 2021) and Camino de lava (Gretel Marín, Cuba, 2022) join this selection. The former, winner of the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award at the IV INSTAR Film Festival, held in 2023; the latter, one of the most profound works made on the island in recent years.

Gonzalez comes from organizing in Cuba, while working at the International School of Cinema and Television (EICTV), the public space Confluencias del Lente, or promoting the audiovisual production network Encuadre. At that time, he was also linked as a collaborator of the Muestra Joven ICAIC, whose dissolution he considers a watershed for filmmakers of his generation.

Therefore, in “Cuban Cinema Without Borders” he wants to "show a sort of rebirth of Cuban cinema despite the pandemic, the economic, political and social crisis that exists in Cuba. A cinema that more consciously seeks to circumvent censorship, that is more politically committed without fearing the consequences of having a critical look at the national reality. There is a common thread that connects very well the desire of these films to respond to a lack of freedom of expression and political persecution with very creative solutions,” he says.

“And on the other hand, I can't look at contemporary cinema without stopping at those archives that were kept in oblivion, buried, as is the cinema of Landrián. I like to think of him as a sort of angel of history, in the sense of Walter Benjamin, because looking at the past, at those archives, is a way of moving forward. That's why it makes perfect sense to connect the work of this indispensable figure for our generation, one of the filmmakers who has been one of the founders of the cinema of the great Cuba, according to Ana Lopez's definition,” he emphasizes.

“Cuban Cinema Without Borders” begins on October 23, five days before the V INSTAR Festival will be shown in theaters in Madrid, Barcelona, Munich and Paris, as well as in Cuba through the online platform Festhome. Through this option, Cubans on the island will be able to see films that the authorities prohibit or do not wish to broadcast. In spite of this, there are more and more spaces for them.