Fifteen films make up the “In Competition” program of the fifth edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, which will take place in several cities around the world between October 28 and November 3. The Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award is being contested this year by films from Cuba, Hong Kong, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Palestine, China, Ukraine, Guinea-Bissau, Russia, Croatia and Costa Rica (not to mention those countries involved in co-production). This confirms the transnational character of the event, which has already announced venues for 2024 in Paris, Munich, Barcelona, Berkeley, California. In Cuba, as in previous editions, the works will be shown online through the Festhome platform.

The festival, sponsored by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism, headed by artist Tania Bruguera, continues with this selection to “map critical and vulnerable zones of the global south through cinematography. The organizers specified in social networks that this edition “will be a space to support international independent production and privilege audiovisuals with risky aesthetic and narrative proposals, especially those produced in dictatorial or authoritarian contexts”.

Regarding the “In Competition” program, filmmaker Jose Luis Aparicio, artistic director and programmer of the festival, told Diario de Cuba that the focus has been placed “on those filmmakers who are at the intersection between cinema and artivism”, with the aim of following “the general line of the Institute”. He added: “The 15 works in competition address some of the most urgent and complex issues of their respective socio-political contexts, and they do so from the point of view of experimentation with audiovisual language. We focus, above all, on artists working in dictatorial or authoritarian regimes, under the siege of war, or who have been forced to live in the diaspora”.

This year's jury will be composed of editor Joanna Montero, whose filmography includes relevant titles such as Santa and Andres, Mafifa and The Wild Woman; film curator and writer Jonathan Ali, director of programming at Miami's Third Horizon Film Festival, curatorial advisor for Criterion Channel and contributor to Sight and Sound magazine; and filmmaker and film mentor Francesco Montagner, author of significant works such as Asterion (2022) and Brotherhood (2021), which won the Cineasti del Presente at the 74th Locarno Festival.

The selection includes An Asian Ghost Story (2023, 37 min.), by Chinese artist Bo Wang. It is an experimental documentary that, according to the synopsis, delves into “haunting memories of Asian modernization in the late 20th century through the large-scale export of wigs during the Cold War.” Among other events, the film has participated in DOK Leipzig, where it won the Golden Dove Award, and the Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival, where it won the Arkipel and Forum Lenteng awards. Bo Wang, who currently resides in Amsterdam, is also a visual artist, and his work has been exhibited in such important places as the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Other films with a distinguished international career that prestige the INSTAR competition are Smoke of the Fire (2023, 22 min.), by Daryna Mamaisur, a visual artist and filmmaker born in Kiev, and Only the Moon Will Understand (2023, 18 min.), by Costa Rican director Kim Torres. Smoke of the Fire was at FIDMarseille, DOK Leipzig, Visions du Réel, among other important events on the global festival circuit. Based in Portugal, Mamaisur devises this film essay “from [his own narration], language lessons, personal videos and archival images from Kyiv”, with the purpose of revealing “the divided reality of those who seek a safe place abroad while longing for their home, which is in constant danger of war”. In Only the Moon Will Understand, Torres evokes “different timelines [that] intertwine in the mysterious and stagnant town of Manzanillo [in Costa Rica],” warns the synopsis. This short film has been presented at the Locarno, New York and Valdivia festivals, among others.

By Nastia Korkia (of Russian origin based in Germany) and Vlad Fishez (of Ukrainian origin based in France) is the animated documentary Dreams about Putin (2023, 30 min.), which participated in the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam (IDFA), and is “an essay on the unconscious, nightmares and hopes of many Russians”, as well as “an attempt to reflect on the subject of repression through the prism of art”. His production looks directly at the moment of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when “many people began to dream about Vladimir Putin and to share these dreams in the media.”

Also from China is “In Competition” Republic (2023, 107 min.), a documentary by Jin Jiang that records a secret space in the center of Beijing, tailor-made for a youth that wishes to escape from that society. As if it were a land suspended in time, Republic is home to a particular youth, in which the director sees “an unexplored facet of contemporary China”.

Along with Jin Jiang's film, two other feature films (fiction) are part of the competition: Ramona (2023, 82 min.) and Nome (2023, 117 min.). The former premiered in the Generation 14plus section of the Berlin International Film Festival. Its director, Victoria Linares Villegas, “explores queer stories of transgenerational trauma and sociopolitical oppression,” her profile notes. Ramona illuminates the experience of an actress who - in order to prepare a character - “decides to sit down with young pregnant Dominican women”. The synopsis adds that “[t]hroughout this process, as the girls present the story of their lives to the camera, they themselves begin to influence the production of the film, altering its course.”

Nome is the work of Sana Na N'Hada, a filmmaker born in Guinea-Bissau in 1950 and trained at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). His work, according to the biographical file for the event, “is built [...] in a back and forth between the memory of the Portuguese occupation, the struggles for independence and a reflection on the destruction of traditional societies in Guinea-Bissau”. Meanwhile, the plot of Nome deals with the experiences of the eponymous character after returning to his village years after leaving it to join the resistance against the Portuguese colonial army.

Haitian director Samuel Suffren, author of Agwe (2022), repeats in this INSTAR event. In Dreams Like Paper Boats (2024, 19 min.) he deals with the effects of emigration on those who remain on the Caribbean island when their relatives leave the country in search of a better life. The story chronicles the days of a father who must care for his young daughter while waiting for news of his wife after five years of absence.

Also tackling the theme of family, but from a radically different perspective, Three Promises (2023, 60 min.), in which a boy “revisits [his] past” through a mother's filmed footage of her family's daily life just in the days when “the Israeli army retaliates against the Second Intifada in the West Bank.” According to the synopsis, Three Promises is “a heartbreaking film that conveys the anguish of children and their parents, forced to choose between safety and emotional distress.” Yousef Srouji, its director, usually focuses “on understanding the dynamics of occupation in Palestine and community resilience in conflict zones.”

Participating from Cuba in this year's competitive section are La historia se escribe de noche (Alejandro Alonso, 2024, 20 min.), Parole (Lázaro González, 2024, 25 min.), Petricor (Violena Ampudia, 2022, 9 min.) and Souvenir (Heidi Hassan, 2024, 11 min.).

In the latter film, the director takes a new look at the migratory experience to explore the ideological fetishism of that international tourism that still observes Cuba as a communist theme park, indifferent to the repression and economic precariousness experienced by its citizens. In turn, Petricor is described as “a diary page suspended in time”, which serves the filmmaker to probe “the uprooting far from Cuba”; a theme also present in the films of Hassan and Gonzalez, although approached from other perspectives.

La historia se escribe de noche is a plastic exercise that uses the electrical blackouts that plague the nights of Cubans to allegorize/denunciate the dystopian situation the island is living through. Meanwhile, Parole ties the visual record of the filmmaker's daily life in San Francisco, United States -where he faces “the dissonance of academic challenges and the constant buzz of worries about rent”- with the audio messages sent to him by his mother from an increasingly precarious Cuba.

Rounding out the program are Still Free (2023, 31 min.) and Wild Flowers (2022, 11 min.). Directed by Vadim Kostrov, a Russian filmmaker based in Paris, Still Free shows scenes of a couple - Katya and Kostya - at a lake, and those images would eventually take on “political implications,” since “Kostya was about to join the Russian army, a decision she would later regret.” Wild Flowers, a documentary by Croatian Karla Crnčević, “explores the politics of images and sound through various formats and working conditions.” This film was constructed from the digitization of VHS recordings made by the author's father thirty years ago.

INSTAR also announced that this fifth edition of the festival will have two collateral sections: a “Panorama of Cuban cinema” and a “Retrospective”, which will offer a sample of independent Chinese cinema.

In the first, “some of the most recent works of Cuban independent cinema, which has always been one of the main focuses of our festival since its first edition”, Aparicio explained to Diario de Cuba; that is to say, works “that have already gone through previous editions and also films of the last two years made by filmmakers of the diaspora and others living in Cuba” will be screened.

“The other parallel section [is] made in collaboration with the Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA),” and brings together ”seven Chinese films, including the two in the competition, which allow us to understand the evolution, diversity and difficulties that this alternative movement in China, made outside official institutions, has gone through, and will also allow us to establish a dialogue or a mirror relationship between this and the diversity of independent cinema in Cuba.”