“It is not a Cuban cinema magazine, although the topic is very present in this issue, perhaps more than we would like. It's going to address the problems of contemporary audiovisual, with which many of the problems of Cuban filmmakers themselves who today produce independent films are connected,” Dean Luis Reyes, one of the editors of Fantasma Material magazine, tells DIARIO DE CUBA.

“We are talking about a cinema that seeks the expressive sovereignty of the author in a very open way. A cinema that is also produced, most of the time, from a delocalized perspective. Many of the contemporary filmmakers who make this kind of cinema are in the diaspora and have a kind of conflictive dialogue with their countries of origin. The films discuss with national environments, with socio-political realities where there is a loss of freedoms, and in that also coincide with the situation of Cubans,” he adds.

Reyes, who shares the edition with filmmaker Jose Luis Aparicio, explains that Fantasma Material is a publication that emerged as part of the INSTAR Film Festival, promoted by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, directed by Tania Bruguera. 

“The initiative came from Cuban filmmaker José Luis Aparicio, curator of the INSTAR Film Festival, and had the support from the beginning of Tania Bruguera and Carlos Aníbal Alonso, director of the publication Rialta. The idea was for the festival to have a publication that would somehow address the issues that concern us in terms of film production, but that would not necessarily be the official organ of the festival,” explains the film critic, a member of the DIARIO DE CUBA team.

Fantasma Material has more than 200 pages. Two special dossiers stand out among its proposals. The first one is made up of four essays dedicated to Nicolás Guillén Landrián. The second brings together 11 authors who are critics, filmmakers and academics, not all Cubans, who study contemporary Cuban cinema.

“We asked them to write texts to explain what is happening today with the Cuban audiovisual; in a way, that implies talking about what has happened in the last 20 years. There has been a mutation in the expressive forms of Cuban cinema, in the form of production, in the stories, in the genre treatments. Well, there has been an absolute explosion of contemporary Cuban cinema”.

Another of the works proposed by Fantasma Material is a tribute to Gilberto Perez, a Cuban-American author with a work of film criticism and theory. The magazine translates the first chapter of his best known and most influential book, which gives title to this project. 

“The ontology of cinema that Gilberto proposes has a lot to do with the way we understand cinema. That's why this 'material ghost,' which is not only the magazine, but the ghost that runs through all the texts,” he says.

Fantasma Material will have an annual print run. The magazine is intended to function as a yearbook, and will always be published to coincide with the INSTAR Film Festival. It will be a bilingual publication.

You mentioned some characteristics of the cinema made by Cubans. Can we say, in the current context, that the concept of “Cuban cinema” exists?

It is much debated. In fact, several of the texts in the magazine deal with that question, to what extent it is still possible to speak of a national cinema. At the moment, Cuban cinema, Cuban audiovisual, is in a very precarious, very delicate situation. The ICAIC has been taken over by the authorities of the Ministry of Culture and they have decided to make a kind of state commissioned cinema. They are telling stories that are generally related to official history. The film institute is interested in making 'sinflictive' films in a certain way. 

There is also the other side: the Assembly of Filmmakers, independent filmmakers, filmmakers who create outside the island…

For example, this year a film that obtained a good part of its financing from the Cuban Film Development Fund is La mujer salvaje (The Wild Woman), Alan Gonzalez's debut feature. It is a very interesting film, made in Cuba, in the Cuban context, in the midst of the pandemic, with Cuban actors and technicians, and it is an independent production. La Habana de Fito, by Juan Pin Vilar, which is censored, also came about thanks to financing from the Fund, like other productions that are on the way. What happens is that a good part of the Cuban creators who began their work in the last 20 years are in exile. And the question is how that cinema still relates to the physical nation. Unlike other generations of filmmakers, who when they emigrated joined the logic of the functioning of the industries that existed in the countries of destination, these Cuban filmmakers continue to make their films practically as they did in Cuba. 

And what happens to these films?

They have serious difficulties to circulate. They are not commercial films. They do not go to mass platforms. In general, they are seen in festivals or exhibitions. The question is to try to find spaces for them to be seen much more. In fact, one of the things the Instar Festival does is to bring films to Cuba virtually. In other words, there is no rupture. We are just as interested in the films produced inside the island as in those produced outside, because both come from the same matrix of concerns and interests. That also characterizes the situation of contemporary Cuban cinema, which is still very dynamic, but is still made in a very precarious situation. 

You mentioned La mujer salvaje and also La Habana by Fito, is there another work that you especially recommend?

There is a magnificent piece, which is the short film by Heidi Hassán, Souvenir. There is also Alejandro Alonso's latest non-fiction documentary short, La historia se escribe de noche (History is written at night); a very hard film, but of enormous beauty. These are two pieces made in recent times by emigrant filmmakers. And in the case of Eliécer Jiménez Almeida, he has just made a diptych of two satirical films that play a little with the imaginary world of the Cuban emigrant in Miami. One is Havana Stories. La operación Payret, and the other Miami Stories, which will be released in 2025. Both feature well-known figures such as Susana Perez and Albertico Pujols. That tells you that these filmmakers, despite the circumstances in which they find themselves and the difficulties they encounter to finance their work, continue to carry out projects of this nature, with a high level of complexity, and also that they are always in dialogue with history, with the socio-political conflicts of Cuba and of Cubans as a community, and with the issues of our identity as well.