The Holy Family. Lineages and legacies at the IV INSTAR Film Festival.
By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS - december 9th, 2023
RIALTA
The authors of many films that were part of the official selection of the IV INSTAR Film Festival take the family as a great device to understand themselves as cultural, historical, emotional, political, and social subjects. They are children of dreams dreamed by others, amid circular ruins.
The family is then a surrealistic mirror of Magritte in which they contemplate their backs, scrutinize the past, and find ancient questions to articulate the doubts of the present. As if it were a great sphinx that never ceases to challenge them with numerous and simultaneous enigmas.
Group self-portraits
The documentaries 'To My Father' (Miñuca Villaverde, 1973), 'The Music of the Spheres' (Marcel Beltrán, 2018), 'The Son of the Dream' (Alejandro Alonso, 2016), 'The Pure Ones' (Carla Valdés León, 2021), and the Haitian fiction 'Agwe' (Samuel Suffren, 2022) are true group self-portraits, cartographies of pre-existence, prophecies of the past, diaries of the self-discovery of a multiple identity.
Included in the festival, and this review, as a fundamental antecedent, Villaverde's film -one of the first approaches to family archive cinema by a Cuban filmmaker- reviews the last images of the recently deceased father. At the same time, it seems to register the intimate desperation with which one rushes to fix the memories of the cardinal being who has just disappeared, the fear that the existence of the deceased will be diluted in the merciless anonymity that has devoured billions of lives, and with it, all the connotations, the symbols of a time that persisted in his flesh. It is the astonishment before the irremissible awareness of the transmutation of the present into the past.
With the disappearance of her father, the last possible affective anchor to the Cuba that Miñuca Villaverde left behind years before, with her husband Fernando, vanishes. So, she also hurries to fix the memory of Cuba in her film. In exile, the father expanded into a nation. The affection she professes for him has unfolded into a patriotism not assumed as the suicidal devotion of propaganda and epic, but as the soft security that inspires the mere mention of the national name, the comfort of the group in which the same language is spoken, or the coherent idea we have of ourselves when we define ourselves as Cubans.
In 'The Pure Ones’, an aesthetic legatee of 'To My Father', Carla Valdés León deploys an evocative exercise and a generational dissection through the cinematographic record of an eminently familiar experience, turning us into privileged spectators of the construction of memory. The filmmaker inherits her parents' memories, assimilates them, converts them into the foundations of her own reminiscences, and constructs her perception.
Throughout the film, Carla Valdés León contrasts images of her parents' youth and herself as a child, preserved in old slides and videotapes. Her adult gaze brings an inevitable, though affectionate, judgment. It is a necessary gesture to understand the influence of the family past on her personal present and to discern the role of her lineage in the contemporaneity they share.
Carla and her parents, Yohanka and Félix, philosophy professors, have witnessed the collapse of utopias and sociopolitical paradigms, experienced the collapse of illusions and collective hallucinations, and lived through the resulting crisis of values. While filming them with several former classmates, all recalling their experiences and surprises when they studied in the Soviet Union during perestroika, Valdés León stands in front of Magritte's mirror. She testifies in silence, out of field, her relationship with the present of Cuba, forced and stubborn heiress of the Soviet legacy.
'The Son of the Dream' and 'Agwe', on the other hand, set out to interrogate migrant ghosts, beings who left their homelands and their own bodies before Alejandro Alonso and Samuel Suffren's time, but who continue to be inescapable presences. They have conditioned the family histories, and they define the respective presents.
Alonso and his parents daydream about his uncle Julio Alonso who, like Miñuca Villaverde and her father (like the filmmaker himself would do decades later), left Cuba. Already at that time, the regime decreed the immediate spectral condition of the "traitors" who abandoned paradise. The island was the only officially accepted reality. Outside its shore, awaited oblivion, the annulment of identity, and even of the human condition itself.
With 'The Son of the Dream', Alonso tries to reconstruct his uncle as a certainty, to give his memory the tangibility of the celluloid with which the film is shot: it allows him to be embodied in something concrete, palpable, like the postcards and letters he sent to his family - proof of the possibility of life beyond Cuba. He ends up recovering an inconsistent part of his past, he manages to reveal as much as possible about one of the vague, nebulous edges of his lineage, which hinders his self-perception.
The muted voice of the uncle must recover its tone and words so that the ancestral framework of identity is complete. His uncle must disappear as torment and re-emerge as calm.
Suffren dedicates the film to his father, who left Haiti decades ago and never returned. The sea denied him the chance to reach the prosperous lands he once vowed to conquer. The filmmaker's loss is shared by many Haitians and many other citizens of the rest of the world who have seen their families mutilated by the exile.
The lack of records or testimonies about the journey, the possible shipwreck, and the final fate of his father forced him to recreate one of the many possibilities. Suffren opts for fiction and gives his story an allegorical dimension.
The Agwe child becomes a collective character, an orphan totality, a global longing. All these children of absence, heirs to the desperate migratory impulses that ruled the lives of their ancestors, are the tender and sad endings of countless interrupted love stories. Their lineage is that of flight; their future is a doubt scattered in the waters of the world.
Family, race, racism
'The Music of the Spheres' follows paths close to Suffren's film, as it deals with the fatalisms of raciality in the Caribbean, which seal the fate of millions, victims of the persistence of colonialism, its ways, hierarchies, and racist foundations.
Marcel Beltrán's feature film is a sort of journey to the seed, an exploration of the routes his parents traveled from the heart of their families, their youth, decisions, and loves until the births of the filmmaker and his brother Darío. Like 'Agwe', the film is also a love story, but it approaches this feeling as a sublimation of the personal consequence of the characters. The filmmaker's coming into the world is an emancipatory gesture.
Cuba is a racist country; it has not ceased to be so. A few generations separate us from centuries of slavery. It is also, increasingly, a classist country.
Marcel's life has directly challenged such assumptions: it is the result of the rupture with inherited discrimination as a reflex. His mother, white and a descendant of an affluent middle-class family, fell in love with his father, black and from a humble family. It is a situation as elementary as it is essential to decode the racial and racist logic of the nation.
In the documentary film 'Roads of Lava' (Gretel Marín, 2023), the small family composed by Afibola Sifunola and her young son Olorun Sile travel in reverse the same path proposed by 'The Music of the Spheres': it records moments in the process of shaping the identity of the protagonist child, instructed by his mother, his first and defining teacher.
Afibola seeks to make him aware of his place in history early on as the heir of a collective lineage, of a culture segregated by the survival of racist colonial canons, but, at the same time, she seeks to provide Olorun with a powerful agency that can only be achieved through a clear understanding of the past.
The child's future is unpredictable, but his self-recognition as a socio-cultural and political subject will help him build a project of destiny, an ideal of life closer to fulfillment. Afibola embodies an ancestral force that supports but does not indoctrinate, even if her discourse always verges on militancy. Olorun's past has survived due to her resilience. The eternal battle for prevalence and dignity leaves deep, numerous scars.
Families and abysses
The fictions 'Blue Heart' (Miguel Coyula, 2021) and 'The Rodeo' (Carlos Melián, 2021) invite (tempt) us to travel through the dark side of the family, assumed respectively as a biological aberration and a canceled lineage.
Coyula's feature film proposes a biopunk dystopia, existential and sardonic, at the same time, in which a desperate Fidel Castro decides to create a race of "new" men and women, of "super revolutionaries", by manipulating their own DNA. A group of women are impregnated in vitro without their consent, and the repression of will - not only the dream of reason - can only produce monsters.
The terrorist mutants that shake the foundations of a future Cuba still controlled by the Castro regime are the result of the instrumentalization of the family, of the utilitarian kinship fostered without regard for the affective links that end up defining the family more forcefully as a consensual, balanced sentimental network.
The Castro of the film assumes lineage as a method of perpetuation ad infinitum and caste as an obedient extension of his senses and limbs. He pursues immortality and ubiquity through genetic replication, through the cloning of his will. It disdains the uniqueness of each individual. It denies the -Marcusian- tendency of the progeny to defy the progenitors, to demand that they surrender their temporary reign over the world.
The Blue Heart family model is the most retrograde, sick, and tragic, but quite common throughout human history. Gestating implies infinite responsibilities for the parents and no obligations for the children. Producing offspring to guarantee status and power can only lead to a biological variant of slavery.
'The Rodeo', on the other hand, is the abyss that observes those who look at it for too long. In its tenebrous center nestles a family whose future is mutilated after the death of the firstborn. The elderly Niña and José have lived an existence besieged by impossibility and frustration, symbolized by the islet where they reside, which was once the highest point of a town that drowned in an artificial dam. Now, it is a castaway's den.
The death of the son severs his last chance to pass on something to the world. José tried to build a rodeo in town, as explained throughout the story, but failure sealed his project. The descendant was unable to expand his hopes, have any joy, or fulfill himself where his parents failed. The family is also the journey through time of a collective possibility, revitalized in each generation. The interruption of this journey annuls for many the meaning of existence.
Niña and José are as desperate as the Fidel Castro that Coyula imagines. Life has taken care of sterilizing and isolating them. All roads are cut off. Their past lies underwater, their future underground. They are marginalized beings in a corner of time; the only thing left for them to do is to decide when and how to die. They are also victims of the narrow conception of the family as direct consanguinity, for around them swarm the affection of other relatives and friends who accompany their departure, who will remember them.
Epilogue
The family is a ghost that haunts Cuban cinema. It torments and redeems. It terrifies and soothes. It alerts and reassures. It is beginning and end. It is a multiple path. Obsession and calm. Life and death. Sound and fury...
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