While the opening credits of Parole (Lázaro J. González, 2024) roll, on black, the voice of a woman is heard screaming. It sounds like the voice of a Cuban woman. When the image bursts in, a fixed shot frames the director, at a frontal angle and from a safe distance. He is sitting on a bench in some public space. The image is subtly icy; You imagine a cold day, autumn or winter. There is little movement. Some people walk inside the plane, a man is sitting at the other end of the bench, pigeons can be seen on the floor, and several cars can be seen passing by in the background. The woman's screams invade the image and a dissonance, a tension is produced... What we see corresponds to California, United States, where Lázaro J. González lives. The voice apparently comes from the audio messages that the director regularly receives from his mother through WhatsApp. Can that voice really be heard from the island? Now we hear Lázaro's mother say that in her neighborhood it is said that many people are leaving Cuba.

In that close-up, Parole encrypts all its meaning. That moment becomes the final couplet of an English sonnet, whose quatrains, conversely, we will learn about from now on. Parole does not represent; It is the experience of an émigré, his subjective experience. And he is so eloquent about it because González permeates the form (the expressive handling of photography, the punctual knotting of audios and images) with his emotional state: that disconnection with the place where he now lives that shakes/impacts his being. Parole is a film of the sensations that its author experiences after having tried to leave behind a world from which he ultimately cannot detach himself, a world that he always carries with him.

He understands that this world is also his mother. She is her homeland and it is Cuba. From a distance, through audio messages, she enters the city where her son lives. In this tension between documentation and messages (which is actually a productive dialogue) the pain underlying the conviction that there is no turning back is condensed. The mother is heard saying: “It's true that you shouldn't come back until we see what we can do. No, no, calm down there, don't even think about that [...] it's better to wait; "Even I would be terrified that something would happen to you and then you wouldn't be able to turn." Beyond the economic setbacks that make González hesitate about a possible visit to Cuba, this comment distills the magnitude of the situation that pushes Cubans to emigrate. The fear of being locked up on the island forces people to postpone even a brief family reunion. And such anxiety is inevitably accompanied by the sensation of living as someone else; The space is a mirror where you can recognize such a condition, every brief conversation with a native as well. The few encounters that González has always occur off camera – and not only because the camera is his eyes or because the city is his body and speaks for him – but because, at times, the director becomes a spectral presence, an individual who It has not yet found fertile land to put down roots. In this documentary experience he is less a body and more a voice, a voice that slides between avenues and alleys.

I said that the city in Parole is the body of the director, when in purity I should have said that it is the statement of his feelings. Parole is a physical film: it records in the profile of the city the perceptions of the emigrant, his intimate collisions – according to the director they are the places he frequents, where he usually passes every day.

Two reasons for photographic criteria draw attention to this matter. First, the work with fixed shots, always frontal and subjective, that cut out fragments of that city as if “postcards” were taken from a town to send at Christmas. (Sometimes González confesses that the documentary is to show his mother where he lives). Then, that recurrence, over and over again, of the same urban, architectural, traffic motifs... that reaffirms the feeling of routine. That recurrence is the stuff of its time, and consequently the tempo of the narrative. This intentionality in the visual design postulates that we are not within the real city, but within the city that Lázaro González lives. Or to be more precise: Parole delivers the image that the city returns of itself to the director, a city filtered by its subjectivity, its affections. Each space, each urban or architectural motif then becomes a symbol that exudes his anguish, his confusion, his loneliness perhaps, the recognition of his exiled being.

I said that the camera seemed to reproduce his gaze, and I did not simply mean that it is a subjective camera. I meant that in the composite image we see how Lazarus contemplates his surroundings. When we see the director within the shot, a subtle estrangement occurs: he contemplates himself. He rarely appears in front of the camera, almost always in his apartment; perhaps because there he feels safe, less exposed and vulnerable. But even in his apartment he always appears lying on a sofa leaning against a window, in an obvious posture of introspection.

The documented city, in short, postulates its restlessness, allows us to glimpse the thickness of its circumstances. Virtually empty alleys where people barely walk, subway terminals, streets crowded with only cars in transit, empty escalators or where there are only three or four people concentrated on their phones, certain night establishments... These reasons come back again and again... And its figuration is somewhat reminiscent of the atmosphere of Edward Hooper's painting, where space does not matter as long as it specifically records some place in the city, but rather because of the emotions it evokes. The space in Parole, the set of exterior and interior spaces, gives off that melancholy that the painter poetically printed on his canvases.

Perhaps a key shot of the documentary (and it is a documentary only by convention) is the one that, towards the middle of the film, presents its creator in an American shot, from the front, standing on the divider of a two-lane avenue where they travel , in both directions, cars and motorcycles. It is night and the composition takes advantage of the expressiveness of the bursts of light from the cars. Regretful music is heard, in Spanish. It is an elaborate, plastic image. And at some point, a message from the mother is also heard in which she apologizes for insisting on money that he does not have to send to Cuba. But the disturbance experienced by the economic instability that life in exile entails, or by the pressure of having to help his family, is not so important. In this imposing image, the subtlety with which it is allegorized, as was the case with the initial shot, matters the poignant emotional crossroads in which the director finds himself; The specific reasons that determine it do not matter, but rather its sufficiency in describing a subjective condition of the emigrant.

From then on, the film reveals the director in a surreptitious tour de force: he tries to find Cuba in any figure or environment in the city. In the course of this event, the camera stops at several food establishments. He evokes Cuba by contrast: the abundance of California floats in his memory the scarcity of Cuba. Towards the end, somewhere at night, the director comments: “Mommy, this does look like Cuba.” A few shots pass, and he adds: “Well, mommy, I just found the pea stew from the university, from all the scholarships in my life…”. But the mother says that they are not the same, that Cubans are “bullets” and those have “pork meat.” In a Proustian nod, those peas stimulate the memory of a time of crisis, which is still his mother's time.

In his room you can see a Cuban flag. Cuba is something you cannot lose. The title of the documentary, without a doubt, evokes the residence permit that allows Cubans to travel under sponsorship to the United States. He clings to that possibility now to bring his mother with him. But being with her again outside of Cuba is not only about making her escape from the precariousness inherent to the material life of the country (a matter on which she insists in her audio messages). It is also recovering one of the fragments of oneself that was left behind, which conditions that feeling of incompleteness, of insecurity, in the place of reception.

These days, Parole is competing for the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Prize awarded by the INSTAR Film Festival. The event's objectives are to listen to the qualities of Cuban cinema undertaken outside the island today, when the migratory phenomenon intensifies in Cuba and more and more creators reside in the diaspora.

The condition of emigrant/exile of so many directors is motivating other ways of thinking, feeling, being cinematically Cuba, of dialoguing with Cuba, of being Cuban. It is a theme that systematically returns to “independent cinema”, resolved in explorations that encompass multiple facets (the motivations that urge emigration, the nature of the migratory routes undertaken, and the way in which the condition itself is experienced corporally, emotionally and rationally). as an emigrant, just as Lázaro J. González does in his film). Each film is a new profile, since these authors only speak of/from their self; Each film is an inflection on themselves that makes the work an anatomical scalpel and a personal archive.