Festival de cine INSTAR

An ambitious Cuban film festival underway in California this 2024

By EXILDA ARJONA PALMER – 09 August 2024

MARTÍ NOTICIAS

Still from the film La mujer salvaje by Cuban director Alán González, which is part of the "Cuban Cinema without Borders" showcase.

"Cuban Cinema without Borders" will feature the screening of around 25 Cuban films. The organizer says this is the first time such a large Cuban film event has been held in California.The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive...

The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) will host the event “Cuban Cinema without Borders” from October 23 to November 16 of this year.

“This is a very important showcase to raise the visibility of Cuban cinema, open doors by amplifying the voices of Cuban filmmaking, which is increasingly distanced from the industry and evades censorship in many ways,” Cuban filmmaker Lázaro J. González told Martí Noticias.

“It is also an opportunity to rethink the state of Cuban cinema from very diverse perspectives where an overwhelming majority of filmmakers live in exile, representing the island not only from within but from other spaces,” emphasized González, who is also the curator of the showcase.

“The cycle pays tribute to the cinema of (Nicolás Guillén) Landrián and exile cinema, but it is also a look at what is being done in cinematic terms both inside and outside of Cuba,” he said.

The event includes the screening of the film Landrián by filmmaker Ernesto Daranas, a restoration of the work of Cuba’s first Black filmmaker, and the dark truths surrounding the censorship of his work by the regime’s cultural authorities.

González said that around 25 Cuban films will be screened in the showcase, and it is the first time such a large Cuban film cycle is being held in California, “a place that is more removed from the perspective of what is happening on the island, where the regime turns its back on any hint of independent creation.”

The showcase also includes La mujer salvaje by director Alán González, Llamadas desde Moscú, directed by Luis Alejandro Yero, Mafifa by Daniela Muñoz Barroso, among other short films.

“The event combines debate and the screening of short films where cultural alterity and deterritorialization are explored firsthand, also paying tribute to the showcases held by the INSTAR Film Festival,” González concluded.

You can read the original note here