The fifth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival came to an end this Sunday, November 3, with the presentation of the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award to the documentary short film La historia se escribe de noche (2023), by Cuban Alejandro Alonso, and a special mention to the film Dreams about Putin, by Russian and Ukrainian filmmakers Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez, respectively.

The award -which each year is granted, according to the event's programmer, José Luis Aparicio, to “the work that best explores a taboo subject of the corresponding society through cinematographic language”- has distinguished these two titles among fifteen competing works that delineated a “great and diverse spectrum of cinema”, according to film curator and writer Jonathan Ali (Trinidad and Tobago), member of a jury that also included editor Joanna Montero (Cuba) and filmmaker and film mentor Francesco Montagner (Italy).

During the online meeting broadcast through the social networks of the Institute of Artivism “Hannah Arendt”, Ali stressed - before reading the reasoned judgment - that it was “difficult” to choose just one among so many films that “resonate with our cinematic sensibilities, human values and consciences”.

The jury's minutes argue the laurel for La historia... by virtue of the “expert use of cinematographic language, a language closer to the human conscience, in the act of documenting the serious social, political and cultural stagnation that Cuba faces at this moment,” as well as “its poetically hypnotic nature, evocative of a soul afraid of mirrors and, literally and figuratively, of lights in the darkness.”

“The jury also decided to give a special mention for its important artistic and political work, to a film that sheds light on the impact that repressive political figures have on our psyches,” read Ali: ”Dreams about Putin, by Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez, masterfully transfigures and creates an archive-film that partially belongs to the world of the unconscious, revealing the need for dreams to exorcise our fears.”

In side comments, Montagner thanked the Festival team “for this wonderful opportunity to look at and judge in some way a very important and very political cinema, and to support a change in the future of many countries in the world”. In turn, Montero wanted to especially congratulate Alejandro Alonso, for “shedding a little light on the situation in Cuba”, and also thank the organizers for “this very nice selection of films we have seen”.

The winning film -which follows in the list of winners the documentary Mafifa, by Cuban Daniela Muñoz Barroso- “does not appeal to deposited textual practices,” wrote Antonio Enrique González Rojas in Rialta Magazine. “All referents succumb under the darkness. All the concepts and notions apprehended are submerged in a deep gnoseological crisis. Before this film the only certainty is that nothing is known”.

“History is written at night [...] it is a series of records of urban, rural and coastal landscapes, almost always peripheral landscapes, common and unusual at the same time, which, thanks to the imagination and intelligence of the filmmaker, manage to allegorize “the long shadow” that hangs over us,” says Angel Perez. “The film sculpts in audiovisual form that historical “state of exception” described by Walter Benjamin as the condition and fate of the oppressed. Alonso has found this time in the night, and in the “blackouts” (the increasingly extensive power cuts to which Cubans are subjected), the significant material for his purpose... As usual, this author delivers, with La historia se escribe de noche, a work of meticulous cinematographic goldsmithing: resonances, industrial, natural, apocalyptic echoes that feed the medieval spirit of images where light is little more than a reminiscence are fused”.

About Dreams about Putin, the critic himself has said in the framework of this transnational contest: “Animation is such an eloquent resource not only because of the ingenuity of the iconography developed by Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez to give body to these dreams about Putin, not only because of the visual and figurative verve of these half-baked 3D recreations. The filmmakers have proven, once again, the suitability of animation as a resource for documenting subjectivity. In expressive terms, animation resolves to bear witness to those inaccessible corners of sensibility; in this case, the psychological violence exercised by the figure of the dictator. By contrasting the analogical record of YouTube archives and the plastic artificiality of digital animation, the film reveals the value of the latter to apprehend a truth of totalitarianism that often escapes from the apparent reality that spreads before our eyes.

As part of the closing ceremony of the V INSTAR Film Festival, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera -executive director of the event and founder of the sponsoring Institute- thanked the jury and all the filmmakers who have trusted in the project and highlighted the sustained growth of these events: “This year is the one in which we have received more materials,” she said, and immediately pointed out that the curator had to see more than two thousand films in the process of configuring the program.

“This has been the most international of all the festivals we have done. Already since last year, as you know, we had invited artists from other places that had situations similar to Cuba's, with repression, censorship, dictatorships or authoritarianisms... or from the Global South,” the renowned artivist pointed out. “It's very interesting, because sometimes the big circuits discover the experimental works made in our countries when too much time has passed [...]. So, it seems to me an interesting bet that the Festival [...] has the intention of looking for the most daring proposals, let's say, also in the language [to] address the issues of our countries in the present”.

At this point, José Luis Aparicio noted that the Landrián Award is also intended to be a financial contribution for the next film by the award-winning filmmakers.

Finally, Bruguera highlighted “with great pride” the appearance within the framework of this contest of the first issue of the annual film magazine Fantasma Material, published in collaboration with Rialta Ediciones. “I think this is going to be something that will help the Festival a lot, because it's not only about showing films,” he said, ”but also providing a space for thought and reflection [...]. I hope filmmakers and [the] fans of independent production in Cuba like it.”

“Although this first edition [of the magazine] has a content that focuses on Cuba, the idea is that in future editions -like the Festival itself- it will also look at films from other regions of the world,” said Aparicio. “And, well, the formal decisions of the filmmakers themselves mark the curatorship of the magazine, as well as that of the Festival: to find risky visions, on the margins, that are against all kinds of hegemony, whether political, aesthetic or market. [...] The magazine also has its independence, although it dialogues with the Festival, [...] in terms of content and form”.