The IV INSTAR Film Festival as a "space of audiovisual resistance". A conversation with José Luis Aparicio
By EDGAR ARIEL – December 3rd, 2023
RIALTA
Let's start at the beginning. What we know today as the INSTAR Film Festival, which will reach its fourth edition between December 4 and 10, had its origin as truth and potential in a retrospective curated by Cuban critic Dean Luis Reyes at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The exhibition 'Cuban Cinema under Censorship' took place between March 9 and 11, 2018, linked to a personal exhibition by Tania Bruguera. Then, in 2019, with the organization and curatorship of actress and writer Lynn Cruz, the INSTAR Film Festival began. From that moment until now, it has been a platform for the presentation and exchange of Cuban films that have been made in coercive and totalitarian environments. Peripheral environments. Dissident environments.
To find out what's new for this edition, we talked to filmmaker José Luis Aparicio, the artistic director of the festival of its last three editions. We want to know what it means to "Break the glass in case of emergency”, as suggested by the slogan of the IV INSTAR Film Festival.
Aparicio, the INSTAR Film Festival was founded in 2019. Four years later, how much has it mutated?
It has mutated as much as our lives and works have during this period. If one feature has defined the Festival, it’s that it can adapt, reflect, and enhance from its structure the changing and complicated circumstances of Cuban cinema and its creators.
The first edition, curated and organized by Lynn Cruz in 2019, was conceived as a physical event at INSTAR's Havana headquarters. It was a sort of culmination of the monthly shows hosted by the Institute at the time, also organized by Lynn, where important retrospectives of the works of Miguel Coyula, Fausto Canel, Jorge Molina, and Eliecer Jimenez, to mention just a few names, were held.
That first festival presented a non-competitive exhibition, grouped into thematic sections and focused on specific filmmakers. Although independent Cuban productions predominated, a feature preserved to this day, some works by foreign authors were also exhibited, including a retrospective of Costa Rican filmmaker Ishtar Yasin. I should mention, as a great antecedent of these early initiatives, the showcase ‘Cuban Cinema under Censorship’, curated by Dean Luis Reyes at MoMA, linked to Tania Bruguera's solo exhibition at the museum.
When I started curating the Festival, in the second edition of 2021, I had the experience of Cuban Cinema in Quarantine, a project I developed together with Katherine Bisquet and the support of Rialta: an online platform that has been running since the beginning of the pandemic. The situation of the country and its artists had changed drastically. We had just experienced the San Isidro strike, the protests of 27N and 11J, the brutal repression, and the political prisoners. As for cinema, there had been the censorship of 'Dreams Adrift' and the cancellation of the Young Filmmakers' Showcase, the event that best served, for almost twenty years, the country's alternative audiovisual production.
It was more necessary than ever to gather, display, and discuss the films made in those recent, dark, and turbulent times, yet also very fertile for our cinema, as most of them had not been properly showcased. The impossibility of organizing a physical event in Havana due to the surveillance and repression of the Cuban State Security forced us to look for virtual alternatives. We decided to prepare an online edition through the Festhome platform and INSTAR's social media, with the organizational and programming support of Sindy Rivery.
This second edition kept the non-competitive format. The films, mostly Cuban -although there were a handful of pieces from Latin America and the Caribbean- were again grouped into thematic sections. Highlights included special presentations of pieces such as 'In a Whisper' (2019, dir. Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez), 'I Want to Make a Film' (2020, dir. Yimit Ramírez) and 'Blue Heart' (2021, dir. Miguel Coyula), essential films of the recent Cuban cinema that had barely been seen on the island. In the talks and debates, we were joined by important foreign guests such as Swiss Milo Rau, Mexican Alonso Ruizpalacios, and Argentinian Alejandro Fadel.
Last year, we went to Kassel, Germany, to present the exhibition 'Land Without Images’, the largest retrospective of alternative Cuban cinema to date, with more than 160 works from the last seven decades. This exhibition was one of INSTAR's activities at ‘documenta fifteen’, so we consider it our third edition. It was conceived in the context of a massive exodus of thousands of Cubans, including a large part of the island's artistic and intellectual community. From one moment to the next, most of the filmmakers that INSTAR had accompanied through the Festival and initiatives such as the P.M. Fund were living and creating in different parts of exile.
Where do we set the headquarters of an event whose fundamental impulse has been the promotion and exhibition of Cuban independent cinema, when its homeland is inaccessible? How can we choose a point, fix an axis, among the multiple places of an ever-expanding diaspora? Isn’t the nation a more complex entity than the one defined by geographical limits and political extremes?
Since Kassel, we began formulating these questions and dreaming of the idea that brings us to this fourth edition: the possibility of reinventing the festival in the image and likeness of our guild, culture, and simulacrum of a country. If Cuban cinema today is a transnational entity, a phenomenon without a center, a sort of rhizome, then the INSTAR Film Festival must be an event in correspondence, one that knows how to capture the multiplicities and enhance this absence of center, of territory. A project that expands in all directions and takes advantage of everything that can be fertile in these new circumstances.
The IV INSTAR Film Festival will take place during the week of December 4-10, 2023, with screenings in Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Paris, Miami, New York, and São Paulo. Most of the program will be available for Cuba through the virtual platform Festhome. Additionally, there will be lectures, debates, and master classes that will be transmitted through the Institute's social media. This hybrid, multiple, and simultaneous structure will be the new format of our Festival.
What characteristics do you think distinguish this festival from others around the world?
I have no idea what could distinguish us from so many other festivals, considering the variety and degree of specialization these events reach nowadays. And, more than anything, their proliferation, which mainly stems from necessity. Although even the big festivals face the question of their survival every year, this does not stop the emergence of small initiatives like ours, whose vocation is to make more daring, personal, and counter-hegemonic works visible.
Yes, I can mention some features that identify us. The concept that guides us is the transnational character of the New Cuban Cinema, whether it is made inside or outside the island. This is evidenced not only in the means of production but also in the different geographies it occupies, its aesthetic and thematic searches, as well as the new contexts of life and creation of its artists. One of our goals is to present to increasingly diverse audiences some of the most relevant works of contemporary Cuban cinema.
These films will be in dialogue, starting this year, with films by filmmakers whose socio-political and artistic production circumstances are close to ours (for example, in this edition, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Iran, and the Philippines). We are interested in generating spaces for exchange and feedback between cinematographies that suffer from the neglect, censorship, and persecution of authoritarian governments.
Many filmmakers from these regions of the global south where freedom of expression and creativity are seriously threatened also live and work in exile. Many of them are also not allowed to return to their countries, like so many Cuban artists and citizens. The human and creative conflict that this situation implies, as well as the ways to address it through cinematographic language, is an issue that interests us as a festival, not only from the curatorial point of view but also as a theme to be addressed in our spaces for thought and reflection.
Another feature that defines us, emphasized from this edition onwards, is the itinerancy of the event and its ambition of ubiquity. This is an experiment that we hope to consolidate in the future. Our festival aspires to be a space of audiovisual resistance. A kind of hydra that, in the face of each totalitarian attack, grows two new heads out of the gash.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the institutions, organizations, cultural centers, theaters, and museums that have welcomed us. And also to the tireless INSTAR team, guided by the passion of Tania Bruguera and sustained by the dedication of our producer Leila Montero.
What are the specific new features of this edition of the event?
In addition to the new itinerant, simultaneous, and transnational format, this fourth edition will present for the first time a competitive section. Fifteen recent titles, including short, medium, and feature films of different genres, produced between 2020 and the current year, aspire to the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award, which will be granted by an international jury to the work that best addresses, from the audiovisual creation, a controversial topic of its corresponding society.
We are fortunate to have a prestigious jury, comprised of Brazilian film critic and historian Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Cuban screenwriter and film producer Alejandro Hernández, and Bosnian academic and researcher Dunja Fehimović, to whom we are deeply grateful for their time and dedication.
Some of the most relevant Cuban films of recent times are present in our curatorship: 'Option Zero' (2020, dir. Marcel Beltrán), 'Mafifa' (2021, dir. Daniela Muñoz), 'Abyssal' (2021, dir. Alejandro Alonso), 'The Pure Ones' (2021, dir. Carla Valdés), 'The Rodeo' (2021, dir. Carlos Melián), 'Veritas' (2022, dir. Eliecer Jiménez), 'Roads of Lava' (2023, dir. Gretel Marín) and 'Calls from Moscow' (2023, dir. Luis Alejandro Yero). We will also host the world premieres of 'Women Dreaming of a Nation' (2023, dir. Fernando Fraguela) and 'A Man Under His Influence' (2023, dir. Emmanuel Martín).
The international selection includes films of great aesthetic diversity: 'Taxibol' (2023), by Italian director Tommaso Santambrogio, a hybrid medium-length film shot in Cuba, with the presence of the great Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz; 'Leaves of K.' (2022), a short animated documentary by Nicaraguan Gloria Carrión; 'Windows' (2022), a self-referential essay by Venezuelan Jhon Ciavaldini; 'Agwe' (2022), a short fiction film by Haitian Samuel Suffren; and 'And How Miserable is the Home of Evil' (2023), an unclassifiable political piece by Iranian Saleh Kashefi. The vast majority of the films in the selection are preceded by selections at some of the world's most important festivals: Berlin, Locarno, IDFA, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, and Visions du Reel, to name a few.
Along with the titles in the competition, thirteen other films will be screened as Special Presentations. A retrospective of the cinematographic work of Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, a couple of Cuban filmmakers living and working in exile since 1965, stands out in this section. This exhibition will include five short films produced in the United States between 1970 and 1980, closely linked to the New York underground film movement of the time.
Two of these films, 'Apollo, Man to the Moon' (1970, dir. Fernando Villaverde) and 'To my Father' (1973, dir. Miñuca Villaverde), can be seen on the afternoon of December 9 in New York as part of two sessions of experimental Cuban cinema hosted by the e-flux Screening Room. This specific section is completed by two short films by Alejandro Alonso, 'The Son of the Dream' (2016) and 'Home' (2019), and the North American premiere of 'The Winter Campaigns (2019), the first feature film by Rafael Ramirez.
Special presentations also include the Paris premiere of 'Blue Heart' (2021, dir. Miguel Coyula) at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris and spotlight the work of two important Cuban filmmakers in their new cities of residence. We refer to the screenings of Marcel Beltrán's 'Nighthouse' (2016) and 'The Music of the Spheres' (2018) at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo and Ricardo Figueredo's 'The Cuban Theory of the Perfect Society' (2019) and 'The Post' (2023) at the General San Martín Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.
I would also like to mention our inaugural activity, which will take place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), on Monday, December 4 at 6:30 pm. Film critic and journalist Dean Luis Reyes will host the talk " The photos of the collapse: Cuban cinema and uncertainty", before the screening of 'Option Zero', a fundamental film to understand the most recent Cuba, especially the migratory crisis that its citizens are going through.
It has been said that the Festival favors "audiovisuals with daring aesthetic and narrative proposals, as well as hybrid pieces that explore new paths of realization", and that it is also dedicated to a transgeneric experience.
The Festival is conceived as a space of cultural resistance at the intersection between cinema, visual arts, and activism. We are interested in daring artistic visions, not only because of their counter-hegemonic readings of reality or their more or less direct confrontation with specific repressive apparatuses but also because of the expressive search developed by the authors.
A revolutionary discourse that differs from the dominant currents needs an avant-garde aesthetic that broadens the limits and possibilities of audiovisual language while questioning the society that surrounds it. These are the works we want to show: uncomfortable films that often struggle to find their way into a conventional exhibition circuit.
Our event is dedicated to those auteurs who not only challenge the status quo, often risking their lives and careers, but also the constraints imposed by the industry, the major festivals, and the film canon itself. In this sense, we are committed to the transgeneric, to those artifacts that move freely between different genres and ways of representation.
I believe that taxonomies are increasingly insufficient and unnecessary to address the creative potential of the contemporary audiovisual universe. In our event, it is not important to separate or differentiate documentary film from fiction film or short film from feature film. Everything is audiovisual creation and deserves the same degree of attention.
The award will have a name, Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Why is this tribute important?
Any tribute to Nicolás Guillén Landrián will always be necessary and somewhat insufficient, especially if we consider the importance of his cinema and the little attention it received for several decades. Fortunately, in the last twenty years, his work has been rescued by critics, academics, and researchers of Cuban and regional cinema, largely thanks to events such as the now-defunct Young Filmmaker's Showcase. And even more importantly, his films have been assimilated by several generations of filmmakers on the island, for whom he has become a sort of guiding figure.
This prize, initially awarded through INSTAR's P.M. Fund, has been relaunched this year within the festival. We can think of no better way to recognize those incisive creators who address the contradictions and conflicts of their immediate social contexts with absolute formal freedom and profound iconoclasm. Now that Nicolasito's surviving works have been restored and his name is recognized among the classics at the Venice Film Festival, it is more necessary than ever to continue recovering those films buried by censorship, neglect, and oblivion. The INSTAR Film Festival also participates in this collective work to rewrite the history of our cinema, and to highlight its alternative images.
You can read the original note here