The Second Film Festival of the Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), held last December 4-11 from Cuba, simultaneously with the 43rd edition of the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, proved that a great official event can coexist with another one that is kept safe from the censorship that rules the island.

Holding a virtual meeting, which left aside the live presentation of the films and the exchange with their directors at the headquarters of the institution directed by artist Tania Bruguera, was the first decision of the organizers that cast doubt on the success of the event. But, in the end, it turned out to be one of the keys to its success.

The INSTAR Film Festival also made it clear that the most disturbing aspects of independent Cuban audiovisuals no longer take place at the largest film festival in Cuba. And it does so for reasons other than artistic ones; in particular, the stigma that weighs on specific artists and works that Cuban Ministry of Culture officials do not want to hear or talk about.

Hence, the most watched films at the INSTAR Festival were precisely two of the recent Cuban fiction features anathematized by the authorities: I Want to Make a Movie (Yimit Ramirez, 2020) and Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021). The former, the center of a bitter discussion during the 2018 ICAIC Youth Showcase; the latter, the most recent work of an artist condemned to "civil death" on the island for opposing to make concessions. 

Both titles, shown in special presentations during the days of the meeting, were followed by A media voz (Heidi Hassan and Patricia Perez, 2019), winner of the Coral Award for Best Documentary at the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema that same year, although without a premiere on the island.

But how was the INSTAR Film Festival conceived and made possible? Journalist and activist Marta María Ramírez and filmmaker José Luis Aparicio agreed to reveal this to DIARIO DE CUBA.

Ramirez, producer of the festival, warns that the idea of doing it in person was always present, but mobility limitations due to the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the situation of harassment of INSTAR's headquarters in Old Havana at the hands of the State Security led to opt for an online edition.

"I discovered Festhome, a platform for online festivals, and although several similar ones were reviewed, in the end we opted for that one," he says.

But once this was decided, there was still the challenge of how to get people in Cuba to watch movies online, taking into account the limited connectivity and the fact that Festhome requires the viewer to pay for access to the content.

"I came up with the idea of taking up the very old idea of the film clubs so that the films could be seen by supporting one person per house, per connection point. And also to finance virtual invitations so that they could access from Cuba without having to pay. Access was also provided to people who suffer deprivation of liberty in their homes and to filmmakers and people in the media," he explains.

"The purpose was not only to circumvent content censorship, but also to figure out how to gather more viewers in a safe place, taking care of the country's sanitary regulations. Because all those measures were lifted after we convened the online festival," he notes. 

As a result of the experiment, in the film clubs created to exhibit the festival's titles, as well as in other existing ones that joined, the films were watched and also discussed.

"That ends up rewarding, because if we did not reach as many people as possible, just the fact that this idea has caught on and replicated is a merit of the festival," says Marta María.

Reinventing a festival

Filmmaker José Luis Aparicio and poet Katherine Bisquet took up the idea of the First INSTAR Film Festival, organized by actress Lynn Cruz in 2019, which was suspended in 2020 due to the global health crisis. 

Aparicio participated on that occasion with her short film El secadero, and by 2020 had moved forward with Bisquet on the Cine Cubano en Cuarentena initiative, the largest online repository of Cuban cinema in existence today.

"Due to the harassment against Bisquet by State Security, she couldn't take on the responsibility, so it fell to me to end up taking on the curatorship," he says.

"From the beginning we set out to make a festival without the traditional taxonomic divisions of film festivals, between documentary and fiction, classic cinema and new forms, and so on. We tried to make the films look like what they are, a bit under the Deleuzian concept of image-time. That is why we included films closer to the visual arts, performance, video documentation, experiments between cinema and theater. I invited several close filmmakers with works made from 2019 until today, years marked by major censorship events, by the absence of the Muestra Joven already for two years, the pandemic, plus a migratory crisis that has ended up with filmmakers leaving the country."

According to the filmmaker, the main objective was to confront one of the most serious problems of Cuban audiovisual production: its almost null distribution and exhibition. "There are no spaces, there are fewer and fewer for this type of film," he says.

The Festival ended up programming 42 films, 33 of them premieres for Cuba, and a handful of sections that covered, according to Aparicio, "social issues; the critical review of Cuba's history; queer cinema on the Island; experimentation with archives; cinema made by women with female themes; audiovisuals made on the margins about subjects on the margins..."

Apart from that, he directed the focus on Latin American cinema, presenting films from the closest countries; a retrospective of Cuban filmmaker Manuel Marzel; several talks; and a theoretical program with international guests such as Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios, Jorge Molina, Alejandro Fadel and Adrián García Bogliano, among others. There will also be a videomapping workshop and another on the deconstruction of a community's visual archive to break the traditional narratives of totalitarian countries.

Milos Rau, Swiss artist, winner of the National Theater Award in Austria, as well as filmmaker and journalist, was also interviewed by Tania Bruguera during another of the virtual spaces of the meeting.

The INSTAR Film Festival concluded with the presentation of the awards for the promotion of independent production, another of the institution's initiatives to make viable the completion and distribution of films that are produced outside the established circuits and/or that assume unconventional stylistic approaches.

"We have to move to a plane where alternative events are not defined by opposition to the official ones, where there is not like this kind of drive to substitute one event with a hegemony for another, but to oxygenate the exhibition panorama inside and outside Cuba," Aparicio concludes.

"The idea is for this festival to have its own purposes, objectives, curatorial lines, strategies, and not to feel like a kind of prosthesis. It's time to create a real alternative culture that is strong, valid and legitimate in its own rights and aspirations. We must continue to generate alternative spaces, not only in cinema, but in all the arts," he asks.

According to the organizers, during the days of the festival most of the spectators were in the United States, Cuba, United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Canada, Italy, Sweden, Mexico, Ireland, Peru, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Austria, Netherlands, Guadeloupe, Colombia, France and Russia. All gathered to see Cuban cinema.