Two collateral exhibitions accompany the “In Competition” program of the V INSTAR Film Festival. Along with the films competing for the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award, a “Panorama of Cuban Cinema” and a “Retrospective of Chinese Independent Cinema” will be shown from October 28 to November 3. The set of titles included in both programs provides relevant examples of the independent movements in those nations, while corroborating two fundamental purposes of the festival: to account for the transnational character of Cuban cinema and to establish “dialogue” with other cinematographies from “countries also ruled by dictatorial or authoritarian governments that impose strong censorship on artists”.

The “Panorama of Cuban Cinema” includes mostly quite recent works; according to filmmaker Jose Luis Aparicio, curator and artistic director of the event, these are “some of the most significant pieces of the independent production of the island and its diaspora”. Meanwhile, the “Retrospective of Chinese independent cinema” is a selection of documentaries “curated in collaboration with the Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA)”, which, Aparicio stressed, “will allow us to appreciate the evolution of alternative filmmaking in this country, as well as to reflect on its constant tensions with the state over the past three decades”.

Intrinsic to these productions from Cuba and China is the quality -encouraged by INSTAR- of forging forms under a determined intellectual commitment, which implies exercising criticism within their respective societies. These are films that combat the complacent narratives designed by the powers that be, while at the same time erecting others to vindicate or contest so many unfortunate lives, disadvantaged social spaces, symptoms of repression, chapters of the past confiscated by the State, in a collation of experiences capable of condensing the historical climate of their countries.

In the Cuban exhibition, between fictions and documentaries, the curatorship has decided to deliver an eloquent catalog of the aesthetic searches, the creative paths and the frequent themes in the independent film landscape. And it includes both directors who are just starting out and others who are well established and whose films have been screened at some of the world's most prestigious festivals (irrefutable evidence of the caliber of these productions and the interest they arouse today at the international level).

This “Panorama of Cuban Cinema” includes the following documentaries: Camino de lava (2023), by Gretel Marín; Casa de la noche (2016), by Marcel Beltrán; Cuatro hoyos (2023) and Mafifa (2021), both by Daniela Muñoz; El derecho a la pereza (2023), by Ixchel Marina Casado; La Habana de Fito (2023), by Juan Pin Vilar; La isla que se repite (2022), Now! (2016) and Persona (2014), by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida; Llamadas desde Moscú (2023), by Luis Alejandro Yero; and Tartessos Dune (2023), by Josué G. Gómez.

Recurring among these films, for example, is the theme of emigration. It appears from different angles in Llamadas desde Moscú, Cuatro hoyos and Persona. The authors cover both its impact on people who remain in the country and on people who settle in a new cultural geography, and generally point to the migratory phenomenon as a corollary of the political and economic situation on the island. Emigration is often presented as the historical balance of the Revolution. Another frequent peculiarity in these works is the anthropological scrutiny of society, its conflicts and tensions, something that can be appreciated in Camino de lava, Mafifa or El derecho a la pereza. Mafifa, which last year won the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award, also shows a significant interest in memory, an issue that also plays a leading role in the thematic landscape of independent Cuban cinema. Fito's Havana -which suffered one of the most notorious acts of censorship on the island in recent times- and Tartessos Dune also revolve around memory. The latter is an experimental essay that works with the materiality of celluloid films, just like Casa de la noche.

Completing the Cuban selection are the following fictions: Ángela (2018), by Juan Pablo Daranas Molina; El espacio roto (2024), by Gabriel Alemán and Eduardo Eimil; Hapi Berdey Yusimi in Yur Dey (2020), by Ana A. Alpízar; Havana Stories [La operación Payret] (2023), by Eliecer Jiménez Almeida; La mujer salvaje (2023), by Alán González; and Tundra (2021), by José Luis Aparicio.

Among these fictions, there are also singular looks at emigration and exile, specifically in titles such as Ángela, Hapi Berdey Yusimi in Yur Dey, and Havana Stories [La operación Payret]. This hybrid work by Jiménez Almeida sheds some reflections on the memory of the Revolution, on the repressive nature of the Cuban regime and its impact on the family and individual lives of several generations forced into exile. El espacio roto and Tundra, for example, reveal a practice that is quite systematized by the Cuban independent movement: the instrumentation of genre cinema codes (especially dystopia).

For its part, the retrospective of Chinese cinema includes the following films: Bing'ai (2007), by Feng Yan; Disorder (2009), by Huang Weikai; The Cold Winter (2011), by Zheng Kuo; The Memo (2023), by the Badlands Film Group, and The Second Interrogation (2022), by Wang Tuo. These five documentaries will be joined by two others chosen for the competitive section: Republic (2023), by Jin Jiang, and An Asian Ghost Story (2023), by Bo Wang.

These independent Chinese productions not only make it possible to get to know the incisive problematizing criterion with which these creators delve into the harsh and politicized reality of their country. They also reveal the authentic avant-gardism that they imprint on their cinematographic creation. In fact, some of these materials come from/circulate in visual arts spaces; such is the case of The Second Interrogation and Disorder, works with a revealing plastic and intergeneric treatment.

As is often the case with art attentive to the accidents of the society that produces it, several of these documentaries (as is the case with some of the Cuban films) present an accentuated anthropological character and an inclination towards social vindication. Two examples... From an observational point of view, Bing'ai shows the daily life of a peasant woman living near the Yangtze River; we observe her life with her sick husband and two children, her lifestyle and customs, and above all her confrontation with the authorities who decided to build a large hydroelectric dam that would ruin her existence. The Cold Winter approaches the process of eviction and demolition of a community of artists in Beijing by a real estate company; it shows the collective resistance, although perhaps the greatest virtue of the film lies in exposing the conflicts generated among the creators themselves: their criteria and positions regarding the market or the consequences of assuming, precisely, political positions. 

The Second Interrogation addresses the conflicts of the art world. The staging of the encounter between a censor and an artist unfolds a reflection that transcends censorship itself to encompass the ideology of contemporary art and the meanings of creation under a totalitarian system.

The other two films in this Chinese exhibition (apart from those included in competition), also have commendable aesthetic and discursive values. Disorder is a compilation film made with archival videos that capture the dynamics and outline the profile of a metropolis. It is a sort of urban symphony that not only documents the logic of globalization in China, but also the overwhelming, sometimes absurd, climate of a quasi-dystopian city. In The Memo, Yang Xiao and Chen Sisi, members of the Badlands Film Group, set out to explore practices of resistance in marginalized communities. The film records, through an original formal move, the activism of migrant workers during confinement in Shanghai.

All these documentaries from the “Retrospective of Chinese independent cinema” will be shown at the Museum Villa Stuck in Germany, where they also form part of an exhibition project on censorship -The Condition of No- conceived by artist Tania Bruguera.