Among the Cuban-made films, “La historia se escribe de noche” by Alejandro Alonso; “Parole” by Lázaro J. González; “Petricor” by Violena Ampudia and “Souvenir” by Heidi Hassan were finalists.

The INSTAR Film Festival has just published the selection of films that will be in competition for the “Nicolás Guillén Landrián” award, given in homage to the Cuban documentary filmmaker and painter, to the work “that best reflects and explores a taboo subject of its corresponding society”.

The award is accompanied by $3,000 dollars to “support the development of the winning artist's next work,” reported Instar.

“As usual, the curatorship focuses on the work of filmmakers who produce within authoritarian contexts or who have been forced to live and work in the diaspora, who focus on key issues, delicate, of the socio-political situations of their different societies and who also do this from an exploration of film language, from the search for new ways of making political cinema and reflect on the state of the world today,” filmmaker Jose Luis Aparicio, artistic director of the annual festival of protest cinema, told Martí News.

Among the Cuban-made films, “La historia se escribe de noche” by Alejandro Alonso; “Parole” by Lázaro J. González; “Petricor” by Violena Ampudia and “Souvenir” by Heidi Hassan were finalists.

Also selected for the competition were the Chinese-Dutch production “An Asian Ghost Story”, by Bo Wang; “Dreams about Putin”, by Nastia Korkia, Vlad Fishez and “Ramona” by Dominican Victoria Linares Villegas.

The winning work will be announced at the closing of the event.

Organized by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), founded and directed by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, the event will begin on October 28 and will run through November 3 with simultaneous activities and screenings in different cities around the world: Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Munich and the Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley in California.

“Our goal is always to create a space for dialogue and exchange for filmmakers working in contexts where the freedoms of expression, of artistic creation, are threatened. We want to give visibility to their works and also create a space for discussion and debate on this intersection between art, film and activism,” he said.

As in previous editions, the films will be shown in Cuba through the online platform Festhome, during the entire week of the festival.

In addition to independent Cuban films, the festival will feature films from Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

“We will have a retrospective of contemporary independent Chinese cinema of the last 20 years and we have established a collaboration to show a series of works that reflect the development of that film movement made outside official institutions in China,” Aparicio said.

The festival inaugurates the parallel section “Panorama of Cuban Cinema”, where “recent Cuban films of the independent movement” will be shown, the artistic director stressed.