From December 5 to 10, under the coordination of filmmaker Ricardo Figueredo, CADAL (Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America) presents at the Manuel Antín Hall of the San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires the IV Film Festival of the Hannah Arendt Institute, directed by renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera. Admission is free, and vacancies are limited to the hall’s capacity. 

Aparicio had two extraordinary films in different editions of BAFICI, the feature 'Dreams Adrift'(2021) and the medium-length film 'Tundra' (2021), which operate as X-rays of a particular malaise spread like a dire mantle over the island of Cuba: the one that affects people who are not submissive to a dictatorial regime when it has adopted a tree-like dynamic. A thousand forms of microscopic control with which fascism directs, inspects, supervises, and inhabits the minds of those under its rule. A more or less encouraging news is that dictatorships also fail. Under the shadow of these loopholes, an eternal desire for autonomy creeps in. Free films are made; the ingenuity, the courage, the careful resilience of those who venture into minefields without hesitation can make the difference. Emigrated or exiled directors like Aparicio gain the unspeakable advantage of an ecosystem of freedom that, however, does not guarantee everything. In the honesty and the lucidity of filmmakers like him lies the expectation of a cinema free of camouflaged complicities or compromises, a cinema capable of holding the tyrants' gaze without renouncing imagination and true artistic independence. Cinema can be free when its identity is not regulated by the acquiescence to a global rhetorical inventory. As long as there is life in images, there will be hope.

Aparicio, who is currently living in Spain, explains the details of his curatorship and the situation of a cinema under the weight of threats and restrictions of all kinds.     

DO: What were the general criteria you used to put this exhibition together?

JLA: Since the first edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, the main point of the event has been promoting and exhibiting Cuban independent cinema produced inside and outside the island. The culmination was last year's great retrospective at Documenta Fifteen in Kassel, Germany, where more than 160 audiovisuals from the last seven decades were screened. We consider this exhibition, "Land Without Images," our third festival. The fourth edition presents a competitive section for the first time, with fifteen films aspiring to the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award. Eleven of these movies relate to Cuba, but we decided to also include filmmakers from countries whose socio-political and artistic production circumstances are close to ours. Excellent short films from Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, and Iran make up our selection, as well as the medium-length film ‘Taxibol', shot in Cuba by Italian filmmaker Tommaso Santambrogio, with a narrative that explores the dictatorial history of the Philippines. We will also present films by Cuban filmmakers who are shooting in the diaspora, where they address the migratory crisis that the island has been going through for years. Our guiding concept is the transnational character of the new Cuban cinema and its growing dialogue with various cinematographies of the global south, especially those of countries where authoritarian governments impose censorship, repression, and exile on their artists. From a curatorial standpoint, we focused on works premiered since the beginning of this decade that explore some of the most critical conflicts of their immediate realities, many of them with a significant trajectory in international festivals. We look for authors committed to their society and their time but equally interested in exploring the limits of the cinematographic language. From very heterogeneous points of view, the films in our selection are risky and powerful civic and expressive exercises. The cinema we privilege is that which understands its political stance as inseparable from its work with form. On the other hand, if we can speak of a recurring theme in this year's program, it would be migration. The vast majority of the selected filmmakers live outside their countries, many are not even allowed to return.

DO: Has Cuban cinema become “transnational" in order to exist? It happens with a good part of the world's cinema, but it seems to me that the Cuban case has very specific needs for it to be that way.

JLA: In order to exist and, I would add, to be free. For the last thirty years or so, Cuban cinema has been made thanks to co-productions, especially with Europe. I am also referring to official cinema, to a good part of its comedies and melodramas. In the case of independent cinema, the scarcity of funds to promote it within Cuba and the insufficiency of those that exist to cover most of its production condition us to seek international support. On the other hand, if it wants to escape the repressive apparatus, the independent cinema on the island should not seek government funding. In the last two years, several films supported by the Development Fund, launched by the Official Film Institute (ICAIC) in 2020, have been censored at the Havana Film Festival and other cultural venues. One of them, the documentary ‘Fito's Havana’ (2023, directed by Juan Pin Vilar), was even shown on national television without the permission of its authors, violating their rights and slandering their work. Added to this context is the migration of a large part of the Cuban filmmaking community, a fractal phenomenon of the severe migratory crisis the country has been going through in its recent history. These creators continue to produce their films in different parts of the diaspora, films that remain linked to Cuba, add complexity to its cultural landscape, and enrich it with dissimilar visions. It is inevitable that these filmmakers also begin to reflect on their new spaces and develop connections with other creators and cinematographies. I believe that what might initially seem like a conflict or limitation, the condition of being emigrants or exiles for many Cuban filmmakers today, could also be seen as an opportunity, a creative and productive challenge that helps Cuban cinema expand in new directions and acquire a more liberated and universal character. The transnational could be the key to a necessary transformation. There are films like 'In a Whisper' (2019, directed by Heidi Hassan & Patricia Pérez), 'Option Zero' (2020, directed by Marcel Beltrán), and 'Calls from Moscow' (2023, directed by Luis Alejandro Yero) as examples of these new directions and vanishing points. I cannot fail to mention that the island's cultural leadership recently censored Yero's documentary. Cultural policy stumbles again, but Cuban cinema is perhaps more alive than ever.

I understand then that there are intermediate zones. Does that "zone" of impossible dreams, halfway commitments, and the official and the unofficial exist?

JLA: I suppose so. The censorship apparatus is tenacious and "effective", but it is not enough to censor all independent cinema; it focuses mainly on those films where discomfort is more noticeable. Several works financed by this official fund, which is also quite recent and grants amounts that pale compared to the acute inflation, have been exhibited at official festivals. The government's tolerance zone for artistic gestures that question its status quo and the most critical conflicts of that society is becoming increasingly narrow. If the last few years have shown anything, as far as Cuban culture is concerned, it is the immense fracture that has occurred between artists, intellectuals, and government institutions. Right now, there are artists imprisoned for their works and political ideas. Right now, there are exiled artists. As much as they try to give the impression that nothing is happening, it is a false tranquility that is very difficult to sell. I think the current state of events speaks of an irreconcilable difference. Fortunately, artists, wherever they are, are finding more and more ways to produce and exhibit their work, getting rid of any dependence on official institutions.

Do dissident filmmakers film how they live: in half-light, as a shadow, as a conspirator, with nonconformity as a motto?

JLA: What you describe could apply to most independent Cuban filmmakers, regardless of their different degrees of dissidence. Let's remember that any alternative expression in a totalitarian context invariably becomes a political gesture. The alternative film movement, which has developed mainly in the last twenty years, has endured precarious production conditions and has survived censorship, defamation, and lack of recognition by the government. Now, it also survives exile or emigration, depending on the case. In the island’s context, one cannot think of the "indie" label as a sort of rebellion against the market because that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about a country with a non-existent film industry and a stagnant film institute that prohibits more than it produces. How can it be understood that this same entity wants to talk to us about decolonization? Our cinema, like all independent art in Cuba, should not technically exist: nothing in its context favors it, except for the overall crisis the country is going through and the need to express, reflect, and analyze it. The intelligence, sensitivity, and bravery of filmmakers have left a film corpus that not only exists but is strong, risky, diverse, and dialogues better and better with what is happening in international cinema. Then come the labels, many imposed by the media and official institutions to delegitimize and even criminalize creation. Of all these, the one I prefer is precisely the one you use: "dissident". It should not be a crime to think differently, to dissent, and to discuss the problems of any society. I think cinema has proven to be a powerful tool to scrutinize reality. Now, in these terms, there is always an effort to homogenize us, and Cuban filmmakers do not all think in the same way. Unlike the monolithic discourse and the political verticality of the regime, the filmmakers' collective is plural, quite democratic, and does not think like a hive. This enriches their works, so aesthetically diverse, but linked to a shared spirit: questioning, re-reading, and re-shaping an idea of a country from images and sounds that break away from tradition to expand in unsuspected directions. I believe that the selection of Cuban films in this fourth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival bears witness to this range of perspectives.