About the Festival...

That the second edition of the INSTAR Film Festival exhibits films like Quiero hacer una película (Yimit Ramírez, 2020), Sueños al pairo (Fernando Fraguela and José Luis Aparicio, 2020), Corazón azul (Miguel Coyula, 2021), Vulgarmente clásica X (Nonardo Perea, 2021) and Now! (Eliécer Jiménez, 2016), evidences the usefulness of a platform for visibilization and mapping of moving images conceived by national filmmakers, which is thought and happens parallel to Cuban institutional spaces. Something well known, but that no one had decided to undertake before; perhaps, many still clinging from a romanticism to the utopian patina of the Muestra Joven. Others, simply for lack of resources or even fear. 

The ultimate obedience to an exclusionary political agenda -beyond the dialogic flexibilities and tolerant softness conveniently applied to calm down excessive tensions- makes entities like the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) and the former Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) -nowadays renamed with an uncomfortable and not at all catchy title- deny their halls, screens and budgets to such discourses that directly question and discuss the superstructure of values, sacralties, myths and taboos on which Cuban power rests as on murky columns of air, screens and budgets to such discourses that directly question and discuss the superstructure of values, sacralities, myths and taboos on which Cuban power sits as if on columns of murky air. 

Films like those mentioned above submit to revisions, questionings and impugnations the very essence of its pantagruelic symbolic capital. They probe nudity, reveal erosions. They have no place in a model of the world that ignores, silences, annuls and condemns everything that directly objects "with name and surname" to its pantheon and its tables of law. That is why they will not be included in any exhibition, festival or film programming monopolized by the institutions and ignored, therefore, in all the cartographies that are made of Cuban cinema from this position. The films of Jiménez Leal, Ichazo, Canel, Villaverde, Almendros et al. are left out of the canonical Cuban cinema, exiled, like so many other filmographies that preceded them. 

The defunct Muestra Joven ICAIC -I don't think it's any other way, and I don't think it should be resurrected- was the alternative and dialogic gesture, more ephemeral than long-lived, of a hegemonic power by nature and principle, which sought to make its field of action more flexible, to keep its potential enemies closer than its own friends, to keep the crows with sharp beaks ready to poke eyes safe. It never went beyond a limited space, a tolerance zone, a ghetto, a consolation prize for the massive exhibition veto that the ICAIC imposed on almost all the works contemplated in its programs. Until the walls could no longer remain invisible and were gradually revealed, with the affairs of Revolution (Mayckell Pedrero, 2010), Despertar (Ricardo Figueredo, 2011), Quiero hacer..., and Sueños al pairo. To mention the most scandalous cases. 

The Havana Film Festival, first of all, is not a Cuban film festival, although in its fold many films find ideal opportunities for national premieres -most of those not directly produced by the ICAIC almost always achieve their world premieres in events outside the country-, and opportunities for visibility among Cuban audiences, potential distributors and critics who set them in analytical and historical panoramas. But it still does not escape institutional influences, which forces it to withdraw films like Santa y Andrés (Carlos Lechuga, 2016), after being previously chosen, or suddenly includes, as happened with the official selection of its 42nd edition, films like El Mayor (Rigoberto López, 2020), without even explaining why it did not appear in the original lists, published more than a year ago.  

The need for Cuban shows, festivals, exhibition and distribution circuits in Cuba, not governed by official institutions, is a cry for help for the national audiovisual industry, on pain of remaining unknown, nonexistent, for most audiences. These initiatives, such as the one organized by the Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism, undoubtedly have other agendas. They have other priorities, other conceptions, but a unique space of absolute and utopian inclusion will never be possible. That is why this is achieved by allowing and encouraging many spaces, whose respective exclusions and inclusions complement each other.

The INSTAR Film Festival has to exist and provoke the emergence of another and another and another, of twenty exhibitions governed by different perspectives, projects, concepts of the qualities, languages and positions of cinema. And so the space of inclusion is widening and approaching the utopia of all and for the good of all. Although all, in turn, seek to compete to legitimize their own "goods".

Even the fact that several films are selected by different and divergent platforms of this type would be a "utopian" symptom of coexistence and acceptance between events that do not have to be antagonistic. There is and should be room for everyone. Hegemony is never the solution. Thus, the Havana Festival and the INSTAR Festival coincide in two Cuban short films (it happened similarly in 2019): Blue Hour (Zoe Miranda, 2020) and Hapi Berdey Yusimi In Yur Dey(Ana Alpízar, 2020). Both are being shown twice as part of the respective programs. I am optimistic about this situation, as INSTAR's space is moving away from the "I accept what you reject and I reject what you accept" objective that could be attributed to it in order to diminish it. I don't even want to talk about enemy payments, soft hits and all that rusty tin.

If the ICAIC and the Festival disappear at some point after the eventual change of regime in Cuba, it should not be out of revenge by the disadvantaged and the resentful for the discrimination they were subjected to by the institution. That they continue to exist, along with numerous other non-governmental entities and platforms, will be the clearest sign that the future may go more or less well. Why not aspire to the Martí paradigm in these dark hours when everyone is calling for everyone's head -many with reasons, others with unreasons?

On the other hand, that the second edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, conceived entirely online, showcases films such as the multinational and multicultural collective audiovisual essay Dancing in the Street. 11 grados de separación (2020), Amnesia colonial (avenencia) (Claudia Claremi, 2020) and A media voz (Heidi Hassan and Patricia Perez, 2019) -also exhibited and awarded by the Havana Festival in previous editions-, indicates that it is an event in the process of maturing and consolidating a vision, an identity and an artistic risk that transcends the first and significant -historical, in truth- gesture of proposing itself as an alternative to the institutional notions of cinema.

Just like its first edition in 2019, the event takes place at the same time as the Havana Festival -in this almost "half" Festival, since it's the continuation of the 42nd edition in 2020-, something that, beyond its indisputable right to be programmed on the date it feels like, does not fail to characterize it as a sort of counter-festival, an antagonistic challenge that at first glance is only worth something because of this contesting and renegade character; and not for its autonomous curatorial and conceptual values that are obvious at the first analytical sweep. Even if that first edition had been programmed in April 2019, parallel to the last Muestra Joven, the clear anti-institutional gesture would have been a little more organic, as it would have become the antipode of the most important Cuban film event promoted and conditioned by the institution. 

About the films... (three recommendations)

Dancing in the Street. 11 grados de separación, which is part of the Festival's special presentations, is a protean, transmutatory film that collectively discusses appropriation as an authentic creative act, a deconstructive gesture and a discursive strategy. It argues with the mere concept of the original in art, insofar as it almost always assumes pre-established forms, things and phenomena -even the abstract zone-, prior to the creature itself that will recombine them into new meanings. Thus, all art ends up being eminently appropriative and referential. Its authenticity resides then in the resignification it makes of these elements in the act of semiotic alchemy that would be each work. 

And once the artistic creations themselves become part of the universe available to other new artists, they are susceptible of being infinitely re-signified every time someone sees in them a potential expressive resource for his thesis.

American filmmaker James Benning (13 Lakes, Twenty Cigarrettes), the unequivocal guru of structuralist cinema, proposes five shots in his usual contemplative style, filmed in Cuba, where the author often goes. They are four spaces (a clock, a street, a building full of windows, an interior shot of a rainy window) and a face. They are five ways of access, of transit, of passage. 

The clock, the great chronometer of the journey into the future that is reached minute by minute, in slow motion, the constant and unwavering tortoise, without Achilles or hare. The face, in this case Benning's own, is the way to the infinitudes of the mind, the soul, reasoning and dreaming, logic and poetry. It is a unique navigation chart of the thought of each unique human being, a landscape in which to divine wonders, an opportunity to read the past and the fears to come, through the application of physiognomy, morphopsychology and other magics.

The windows are allegories of possibility, of distancing, of the invitation to transcend spaces towards new dimensions, or the conscious and cautious fear of facing these risks. The road, which comes and goes towards inscrutable, possible and impossible destinations, is a cardinal metaphor of ineluctable, fatal, inclement movement, full of ephemeral farewells and welcomes. 

In the prologue of the film, Benning is defined as degree 0, axis mundi from which eleven other filmmakers assume his visual and discursive guidelines, and transform them into their images and likenesses. They film in Cuba (Fabiana Salgado), Italy (Alessandro Focareta and Francesca Svampa), Colombia (Germán Ayala), Chile (Andrea Novoa), Brazil (Letícia Simões and Yuji Kodato), Argentina (Melisa Liebenthal), Mexico (Gabriela Domínguez Ruvalcaba) and the United States (Yamel Thompson). They refer, differ, quote, appropriate, deform, invert, are consistent with the movement, with the dialectic variations proposed by the American master from his "static" planes, whose dynamism is of a vertiginous delicacy. New concepts, new confessions, reflections and narratives emerge. New conflicts. New tragedies and comedies.

In this same notion of appropriation as the basis of all human cultural and artistic creation, we find Amnesia colonial (avenencia), and other films based on the reformulation of archival images, also in the spirit of Duchamp's ready-made, such as Causa No.1, 1989. Nosotros, los acusados aquí... (Hamlet Lavastida, 2019) and 35 permutaciones en tres actos y un epílogo (Josué García and Marcos A. Yglesias, 2020). The three works converge in the "Mal de archivo" section of the INSTAR Festival. 

Amnesia... and 35 permutaciones... are respectively about the representation and self-representation of Cuba, of the Cuban, of Cubans. The first film is based on the "domestic" visions recorded by numerous tourist cameras and the second is based on VHS recordings that emigrated nationals saw as the most expeditious and endearing means of communication with their relatives on the island during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Claremi opts for a staging of multiple screens, in the style of Timecode (Mike Figgis, 2000) or Open Windows (Nacho Bigalondo, 2014), which put in crisis the conventional notions of montage, appealing to more common searches in the areas of video installation, or going back to the magnificent simultaneous projections on several screens proposed by Abel Gance in the early twentieth century. 

The simultaneity of stories that Claremi unfolds on the screen invites to an exercise of montage by choice, partly guided by the preeminence of the sound tracks (Figgis style); or else it provokes a more pessimistic perspective of multitude, of indiscernible, tautological mob. The picturesque, exotic and often miserabilistic perspectives of countless tourists who between 2012 and 2020 arrived at Cuban beaches and towns, and filmed the islanders with the classic curiosity of jungle explorers, are reiterated ad infinitum.

Tourists observe how Cubans can talk, do some simple tricks, even wear clothes and walk upright, and exhibit themselves in the market of ready-to-eat lubricious meats for all tastes and erogenous appetites. They collect stereotypes, clichés. They triumphantly confirm their colonial ideas about the Cubans with their encysted smiles, sun, beach, maracas, overflowing sensuality and knick-knacks. They play a little with them, get them to undress, to show off their tanned and athletic physiques. They are surprised when they mistake a very white Cuban for another tourist, or discover a redhead who looks like a Scandinavian. They add these episodes to the repertoire of curiosities they take with them in their equipment, and may never see again.   

Tourists also record the representational logics that Cubans follow in front of their lenses, their genuflecting folding to the whims of these beings they recognize as superior simply because they come from nations across the seas with their armor, fire-spitting muskets and magic boxes that trap images and perhaps steal the souls of those they film. The colonial mind collides with the underdeveloped mind in these videos gathered by Claudia Claremi in the true symphony of colonialisms that is Amnesia colonial (avenencia), tragic and uroboric, vicious and pathetic.

Eliécer Almeida's Now! —although located in the section La isla en peso— also makes use of archival images to structure its conscious agitprop manifesto, which interpellates, complements and responds with its endogenous look at the Cuban police violence of the national contemporaneity, to the exogenous and equally virulent look that has -not without justice and vast reasons- the pristine Now! by Santiago Alvarez (1965) on the repressions of the U.S. forces to the racial movements of those times.

Like Dancing..., Almeida also situates himself in a pre-existing referent to shred it, at the same time paying tribute to it, recognizing it with violence, respecting it aggressively. To reveal it as one of the most brilliant and forceful looks at the mote in someone else's eye that the official Cuban propaganda has made, while the beams of censorship of PM (Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal, 1961), of the forced labor camps of the UMAP and of institutional homophobia were strongly wounding the eyeballs of the nation. 

This Now! which exhibits the INSTAR Festival also ends up agreeing with the vehemence of Alvarez's anti-imperialist gaze and calls to apply it with the same fury to the replicas of these violent strategies seen in the Cuban police forces against those who dissent. He approves his stance against the hegemonic, hypocritical power that previously received Martin Luther King and now received Barack Obama, another black American leader; while in both nations black women, fighters for rights and civil liberties, were and are repressed. The almost mimetic similarities between several of the images used by Alvarez and Almeida give a dread that flatly eliminates all temporal, epochal and spatial distances   

Both audiovisuals, set to music by the Judaic Hava Nagila in the voice of Lena Horne, end up reconciling, joining together in a duet that transcends ideologies to focus its audiovisual sharpness on the abusive and ambidextrous power that reincarnates again and again in both dexterous and pretentiously sinister rulers. Ideologies are pretexts and kitsch veils thrown over the rapacious and intolerant natures of authoritarianisms. The sharp gurgles of the Horne tear and expose them. 

It is healthy and plausible to assume both Now! as a diptych, a confluence, a dialogue between two Cubans, between two filmmakers who deserve to occupy a place in the national film scene in their own right. One does not have to deny, overlap or exterminate the other, just because of the plasticity that the 1965 classic shows to have and its undeniable influence on the 2016 one. Almeida is an indisputable epigone of the best and most transcendent of Santiago Álvarez's film, which will continue to be valuable when there are not even the tiniest pieces left of the Revolution it rabidly defended. And this is the test that Almeida must pass, to survive beyond his just agitator militancy, beyond the motives of his anger.  

About exiles and fugues...

About self-representation in its intimate, emotional, fraternal side is the multi-awarded A media voz, which is presented in a special way at the Festival, only for Cuban audiences, as conditioned by its distributor Habanero Films (the same happens with Corazón azul). This film is articulated as a dialogue between two Cuban sister-friends who emigrated from Cuba in full bloom of their potential as filmmakers. It is basically an act of rediscovery, healing and confession. They go in pursuit of settling the eternal debt that the one who left keeps with himself, and with the "I" that in an alternative reality stayed behind. 

At the same time, A media voz is a chronicle of the relocation and personal reconstruction demanded by this drastic process, this removal of paradigms and perspectives settled in the geo-cultural space where one was born and grew up. It is a recapitulation of consequences and possibilities, articulated from the film essay, a terrain of creative legality where all the possible expressive resources of the audiovisual, visual, sound and dramatic converge.

Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez establish a sort of epistolary of images and words that interweaves archive recordings, snapshots and artistic photos, fictional recreations (with actors included), monologues previously scripted in front of the lens. The infertility that torments the forty years of the two protagonists - doubts on the one hand, insistent and unsuccessful attempts on the other - is the most accurate and precise metaphor of how sterile the process of readjustment, of socio-cultural grafting in a foreign context, can be.

Survival is perhaps the notion and the experience that is most modified in these processes, to which Hassan and Perez rightly subtract any chronological precision -the year 1988 is barely noticeable in some recordings that record their childhood-, just as they often make it clear that the full understanding of the whole range of conflictualities happens only between them. The spectator is left with the cartography of sensations and emotions derived from events that are often suggested, enunciated, insinuated. 

It is definitely a story of survival and even resistance, but never of regret and failure. These heroines have made and are making their way through a world garden of paths that fork towards null or possible possibilities. They whisper to each other from their respective paths. They take stock. They strengthen each other by re-inhabiting an intimate homeland they have cultivated since childhood. A portable, comfortable homeland, well suited to themselves. A fertile ground where all seeds germinate. They project their respective nostalgias on themselves.

Exile is precisely one of the axes around which narratives, ideas and allegories are structured in the Festival, going beyond the specific section that seems to have been allocated to it within the Festival, entitled “The Other Cuba”, as happens with A media voz itself, thus rhizomatizing the entire exhibition in its quality of national value and fatality, conditioned reflex and extreme alternative, punishment and flagellation, curse and relief. 

A ghost is haunting the world. The ghost of Cuba. Cubans found intimate colonies in every country they emigrate to. They are zones of resistance and nostalgia, refuges with the air of orphanages where the elusive notion of Cubanness or Cubanness is reinforced, it becomes almost palpable beyond the customs of rum, tobacco and rumba. The Cubanness of the exiles becomes a coherent abstraction, an unclassifiable but at the same time concrete sensation, a force in struggle and conciliation with itself, a blind paradigm, a multitudinous solitude, a triumphant agony, a rough triumph.     

The documentaries Sueños al pairo and El gran impaciente (Carlos Arenal, 2020), and the short fiction film Alberto (Raúl Prado, 2019) integrate an involuntary triptych of migrations and exiles of Cuban artists and intellectuals. Two musicians who express themselves through the guitar (Alberto and Mike Porcel) and an intellectual devoted to cinema (Germán Puig). Three of the many Cubans who expand the Island throughout the planet. 

Vulgarmente Clásica X (Nonardo Perea) and Sexilio (Lázaro González, 2021) are placed in the section "Derivas Queer" (Queer Derives), revealing the exile as a conflict commonly associated with the vicissitudes of the LGTBIQ+ community in post-1959 Cuba, where male groins underpinned a Revolution of heterosexuals and for heterosexuals. Even lubricious pleasures were relegated to the corner of bourgeois decadences to be eradicated in the new frigid Revolution, of well cis but asexual males. A Revolution where Fidel Castro, its leader and epitome, hid his relationships with women, his wives, married as he was mainly to his ego and its projection which was the revolutionary process. Fidel confessed during the Marcos Rodriguez trial that he had made a revolution bigger than "ourselves". Rather, it was his ego that was bigger than himself, and it still survives him.

In the revolution of virile eunuchs there was no room for gays, lesbians, transvestites, transsexuals, even beyond their sexual preference, but because sexuality was a defining feature of their identities, of their attitudes towards life and existential principles. A revolutionary could not be defined by desire, but must dedicate all these energies to the construction of the future, just as Catholic priests and nuns must repress their flesh to reinforce their dedication to God and Christ.

That is why homosexuals well out of Cuba, since they could not be re-educated in the UMAP concentration camps in the 1960s. That 1980 was a year of purges and purifications of the nation's bodies. Let Mariel be the anus through which the country definitively evacuated from its entrails the rare, unnecessary bodies, the subhuman detritus, the parasitic worms, those without revolutionary genes -that superior and exclusive race of tropical übermensch to which the country and the world rightfully belong.    

Sexilio interviews two of these Cubans expelled from the country for their sexual preferences, which vetoed their right to be revolutionaries, as one of them explains. One could not support the process and like the same sex. That is why the term that titles the film is so precise. Both left Cuba through Mariel in 1980, the planned exodus that is still not talked about enough. Their tragic fate followed them to the United States, where AIDS decimated the numbers of their friends and lovers, even though another life was possible.

Michel, who signs his film Vulgarmente... with the heteronym Nonardo Perea, was a member of the San Isidro Movement (MSI). He suffered harassment by Cuban state security for his political and creative projections, until escape from the country was the only solution to breathe. Now he lives in Spain, harassed by loneliness. With this as inspiration and strength, he composes a hyperbolic confessional essay, self-referential, variegated, bizarre, joyful, tragic to the point of tears, satirical, libelist at times, queer all the time. The sharp work and radical stances of creators such as Kenneth Anger, Bruce LaBruce, Pedro Lemebel and even Barbara Hammer, hang like tutelary spirits, although the author —protagonist mentions Pedro Almodovar.

Vulgarmente... is at once self-parody, self-affirmation manifesto and life testimony, repression and escape of a being who reveals himself to be tormented and joyful, weak and powerful, optimistic and depressed. In the film he exorcises his immediate past of government agent "interviews" and recruitment attempts to spy for the MSI. He seems to make peace with this past by incinerating it, and on its ashes rebuild his existence, gather and melt the pieces into a new mold. Nostalgia and loneliness can indeed be great allies, powerful weaknesses.     

35 permutaciones…, located in "Mal de archivo", deals, as already said, with the construction of the self-representation of the Cuban emigrant, the image he wants to offer to his relatives in Cuba, how he wants to make them participate in it through domestic audiovisual chronicles, how he seeks to show them the other possible world beyond the archipelago of sacrifices, with food in abundance and snow. 

These worn analog recordings gathered by Josué García and Marcos A. Yglesias in their documentary are above all testimonies of the stubborn search for happiness, of social and family value systems where emigration often crowns hierarchies. They are also subtle chronicles of the recovery and healing of the wounds that Cuba caused them, of the unhealed wound that is Cuba - or at least a painful scar but one for which there is (cannot be) no regret.       

Hapi Berdey Yusimi in Yur Dey, catalogued in the "Asi de simple" section - conceived as a showcase for Cuban cinema made by women, with a gender focus - is also a broken search for happiness in times of exile. It is a fable about personal injustices, about gender violence that cannot be solved only by escaping the contexts, as they operate regardless of borders, nationalities, life projects or prosperity. Yusimí (Yusilei Alfaro) flees from a Cuban world where she has suffered abuse, family indifference and has been forced into prostitution. Emigration seems to be the key to everything, and it is the key to some things, but others come with the woman to the United States and others are waiting for her. 

Yusimí escapes from Cuba, but not from her patriarchal subordinations, she replicates them in Miami with a friendlier face, a carnivalized life, flooded in sequins, artificial nails and gold. But her relationship with men continues to be one of submission and dependence, now in a rocking tableau. She comes from a family that has always, as a method of survival through the generations, turned away from anything that breaks the violent and consensual "stability". Like the female people raped by the male government. Like the female people subjected to the male government, which gives them meager sustenance and molds them with hunger and beatings.