It is still October 2024 and Cuban cinema has broken out of the circuit in which it was contained for decades. The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), the state organization created to promote and monopolize film production and distribution on the island, is no longer the main reference for filmmakers, who in recent decades have gained autonomy by taking advantage of technological advances that allow them to shoot and post-produce a film outside the institution.

In a context marked by absolute state control, this means turning upside down the mechanisms that functioned immovably for decades. Now those devices have imploded; the ICAIC no longer produces most of the films, nor does it control their scripts or scenarios. Nor does it offer spaces for dissemination such as the Muestra Joven, since they opted to suppress it rather than loosen censorship.

A close look at the island's audiovisual panorama reveals two things: film distribution circuits are extremely deteriorated after the collapse of most of the country's movie theaters and the closing or weakening of the main festivals, while, on the other hand, a large part of the filmmaking community, especially the younger ones, has left the country in the last five years.

Shortly before things were exactly like that came the INSTAR Film Festival, an event promoted by the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR), the organization founded by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera that combines art with activism and has as its mission to foster civic literacy and promote social justice in Cuba and abroad, supporting the creation of independent artists through scholarships and awards.

When the first edition of the INSTAR Film Festival began in December 2019, independent Cuban cinema was already an elephant in the room for the country's cultural institutionality, which a year earlier had passed Decree 349 as a desperate attempt to control artists in a context of growing autonomy. Officials did not know it, but that elephant was about to walk out and devastate everything that crossed its path.

Tania Bruguera, at the beginning of 2018, had been invited to exhibit the installation Untitled (Havana 2000) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. For the closing of that exhibition, the artist organized a film show at the museum entitled Cuban Cinema Under Censorship, curated by critic Dean Luis Reyes.
“If you ask me what is the origin of the INSTAR Film Festival, I could tell you that it was that exhibition at MoMA, an event that had the same spirit that the festival had, which was to give visibility to independent art and to reinforce or show the world the censorship processes that exist in Cuban culture,” Tania Bruguera explains to me from the United States, where she currently resides.

The Cuban artist recalls that at the end of the screening of the audiovisuals she went to a nearby bar with Miguel Coyula, Juan Carlos Cremata, Eliecer Jimenez Almeida, Orlando Gimenez Leal and Dean Luis Reyes, to whom she asked, among other things, what the filmmakers needed to work. “Production,” he recalls they answered, and from that answer came the PM Award.

Upon returning to Cuba, with the help of actress and filmmaker Lynn Cruz, INSTAR began screening films and inviting filmmakers to its Havana headquarters. After a year, they planned to make a summary of the works screened in December, taking advantage of the attention generated by the seventh art at that time due to the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana.

For that edition, curated by Lynn Cruz and produced by a small team, the directors of most of the works screened were present, but public attendance was poor. The fear of Cubans and foreigners to approach an institution banned by the regime had a significant influence on this.

“It was a war and open fire towards us,” Bruguera recounts. “They tried to stop the Festival in various ways, including intimidating people who were coming. They also told us that there were works that we could not screen because they belonged to them. I remember in particular the case of a student from the School of Audiovisual Media, whose short film was not screened.

Another case mentioned by the artist was that of the filmmaker Ishtar Yasin, who belonged to the PM Prize jury that year, but was also participating in the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, and as punishment for the first, the Cuban authorities suspended her for at least three planned public presentations.

Furthermore, the screenings and debates with the filmmakers had to be carried out in the presence of Police and State Security agents, who were hanging around the INSTAR headquarters; something that not only generated tension among the organizers, who were more accustomed to this type of intimidation, but also among the attending public, both Cuban and foreign.

In Cuba everything was about to fall when the first edition of the Festival ended, so when the second one began, in December 2021, the panorama was totally different: in the middle there was the disappearance of the ICAIC Young Show; the San Isidro strike; the protest of hundreds of artists in front of the Ministry of Culture; a pandemic and the collapse of the health system; the beginning, with the "Ordering Task", of an inflationary process that still persists, and the largest anti-government protests of the last 60 years, with a balance of more than a thousand political prisoners. The largest migratory exodus in the history of the country also began.

Tania Bruguera had left Cuba under threats a few months before the second edition of the contest began, online, curated by Cuban filmmaker José Luis Aparicio Ferrera, who carries out that work to this day.

This time it featured works and authors from Spain, Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, a retrospective of the experimental filmmaker Manuel Marzel, and a theoretical program of talks and workshops on topics such as independent film distribution, genre cinema in Latin America, queer cinema and women's cinema.

Its third edition, held in Germany during October 2022 as part of INSTAR's participation in the prestigious Documenta in Kassel, consolidated the Festival as the benchmark event for Cuban independent cinema while placing it on an international stage. It was a reflection of the situation that the country was going through and a large part of its artists, who emigrated en masse fleeing the crisis.

That edition included the retrospective Land without Images, considered the largest exhibition of Cuban alternative/independent cinema carried out to date, as it was composed of some 175 pieces, which were projected in Kabinett 1 of Documenta Halle for one hundred hours spread over ten days.

«It was a very intense, but very stimulating process, which consisted of gathering more than a hundred pieces and making them dialogue with each other. We curate ten different programs, always seeking a balance between fiction cinema, documentary cinema, experimental cinema, video art. Pieces by Cubans made in the diaspora with pieces by foreigners made in Cuba, or with some thematic relationship with Cuba," explains José Luis Aparicio, curator of the exhibition.

Already with new communities of Cubans settled in several of the most important capitals in the world, the INSTAR Film Festival made the leap to a hybrid format of online and in-person presentations in its fourth edition. Cuban emigrants and other citizens of the world were able to attend to see the films projected in cities such as Barcelona, ​​Paris, Miami, New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires and São Paulo.

At this point the organizers assumed as a premise the transnational character of the new Cuban cinema, and brought to the screens what was beginning to happen to many recently emigrated filmmakers from the island: the establishment of a dialogue with other cinemas. Those of other countries ruled by dictatorial or totalitarian governments such as Cuba were also highlighted.

"We found it a very interesting strategy that the Festival opened itself to the world, that it assumed this itinerant, simultaneous, transnational structure, emulating the current condition of Cuban cinema and filmmakers," explains Aparicio. "Also that it would give space to works from contexts that in some way are close to ours, generating opportunities for experiences and findings to be shared between Cuban creators and their counterparts from other parts of the world."

This format posed new challenges that continue in its fifth edition, which began this October 28 in cities such as Barcelona, ​​Madrid, Paris, Munich and Berkeley, and which among its main proposals includes an international retrospective focused on independent Chinese cinema of the last 20 years curated in collaboration with the Chinese Independent Film Archive, located at the University of Newcastle in the United Kingdom.

In this regard, Cuban filmmaker Leila Montero, producer of the INSTAR Film Festival, considers that "one of the main challenges in the organization is communication. We are a small team of five people located in different countries, such as Brazil, Mexico, Spain and the United States, which makes coordinating schedules to work together a complex task. However, at the Institute we work with a system based on weekly objectives, which allows us to advance our tasks independently and makes team meetings smaller and more fruitful.

«When you add to this the collaboration with professionals and Festival venues in different places, the logistics become even more complicated. This year we have managed to adapt the system better, but last year, being the first time that we held the Festival simultaneously in multiple venues for a week, we coordinated communication between countries such as Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, France and Spain was quite a challenge,” says the Cuban film producer.

“However, we managed to establish effective workflows so that everything turned out on time,” he says. "Although, of course, not everything was rosy, and we experienced moments of crisis and stress that we faced together as a team."

Beyond that, Montero says that "one of the main challenges lies in promotion and communication, since we need to develop a joint strategy with each of the headquarters. They are the ones who best know their spaces and the public that frequents them, so it is essential to create a synergy between the essence of the Festival and the particular interests of each place. “This approach allows headquarters to meaningfully engage in collaboration.”

That a group of five people can generate a Festival with these characteristics seems like a feat. Leila Montero explains that they began to prepare it five or six months in advance and assures that the contest "is very big and very ambitious", but "it is done thanks to the drive, love and sense of belonging that the members of INSTAR have for he".

Regarding the visibility that the Festival offers to filmmakers from repressive environments beyond Cuba, Montero explains that they decided to expand because "the realities of Cuba are reflected in many other countries, and we believe that it is essential to open a dialogue between these filmmakers. This exchange can generate a synergy that not only allows us to talk about our problems and how we feel about them, but also learn ways to confront them.

"At the same time," he says, "the Festival works to give a greater presence to Cuban cinema in other countries, collaborating with various spaces throughout the year to organize exhibitions. In addition, it has the PM Fund, which supports the film production of filmmakers both on the island and in its diaspora.

This year the Festival has new features such as the launch of the magazine Fantasma Material in collaboration with Rialta Ediciones and maintains the spirit of constant expansion not only understood as "trying to be in as many venues as possible", points out Montero, but also in regarding including "other cinematographies that are within our same spectrum, within the same themes that we address."

José Luis Aparicio, who has been in charge of the Festival program since its second edition in 2021, considers that the cinematographic event has adapted during these years "to the life circumstances of filmmakers and Cuban cinema. That is to say, based on the changes that have occurred in our most immediate context, the difficulties that have appeared and the experiences that we have gone through individually and collectively, the Festival has allowed its gaze to be permeated by the spirit of the times and the mutations that we are going through. experimenting.

«When I started working at the Festival as main curator or artistic director, the program focused above all on independent Cuban cinema, on promoting those voices and views on Cuban reality that did not find much room in official festivals and events, "Well, they are films with a counter-hegemonic view and that are made through alternative means of financing," recapitulates the Cuban director and researcher.

Those first films, according to Aparicio, sometimes "could find some space in the selection of the Havana Film Festival, or the Gibara Festival, or the extinct Young Show, but generally they were seen very little or not at all within the island. This is not to mention," he emphasizes, "of a more radical independent cinema, politically and aesthetically, which sometimes did not even have the opportunity to be screened in Cuban cinemas through official events."

For this fifth edition, its curator believes that the "internationalization of the Festival is being consolidated, with a selection in competition where there are four recent Cuban films, but the rest of the works come from very different regions of the world, always maintaining the focus on a cinema that is interested in the sociopolitical problems of their respective contexts, that is thought and made politically.

For this reason, Aparicio emphasizes: «The aesthetic and stylistic choices themselves reflect a political vision, which invariably involves subverting or seeking alternatives to the language of the oppressor, the colonizer, to totalitarian rhetoric, finding new ways to resist, not only from the content, but also from the cinematographic form, new ways of positioning oneself regarding the state of the world right now.

This internationalization of the festival, materialized on this occasion with the inclusion of films from Russia, Ukraine, Palestine, Croatia, Haiti, China, Hong Kong, Guinea-Bissau, responds among other issues to the fact that the situation The transnational nature of Cuban cinema is undeniable, and is evident in the fact that most of the filmmakers currently live and work outside the country.

«There are still, of course, filmmakers who live in Cuba, who produce there. There is the Assembly of Cuban Filmmakers and young filmmakers continue to train and graduate from the island's film schools, but let's say that a large majority of Cuban filmmakers, even those who had begun to build a more coherent authorial work and achieve recognition, both inside and outside the country, have emigrated in the last five years; They have joined previous generations of Cuban filmmakers who live in exile, so right now there is a great diversity of creators living outside of Cuba, thinking of themselves far from that context of life and creation. “We cannot turn our backs on that,” says Aparicio, who, of course, is also part of that film community in the diaspora since he settled in Madrid in 2022.

Specifically, this edition of the contest includes works by Cuban filmmakers living abroad such as Souvenir, by Heidi Hassán; Petricor, by Violena Ampudia, or Parole, by Lázaro J. González, while at the Panorama of Cuban Cinema you can see Cuatro hoyos, the first film by Daniela Muñoz Barroso filmed outside of Cuba, and Llamadas de Moscow, by Luis Alejandro Yero.

"In the end, transnationality, due to the circumstances of life and production, as well as the themes and aesthetic choices of the films, is a fait accompli in the island's cinema," reasons José Luis Aparicio, author of renowned films such as Tundra. o Sueños al pairo (documentary made with Fernando Fraguela). «Beyond seeing it as a limitation, as a difficulty or an obstacle, it opens new possibilities and paths to renew and rethink Cuban cinema. I believe that more and more we must try to ensure that our films, our searches and ideas, dialogue better with the interests of viewers from any part of the world. That's also where the idea of ​​mixing our films with those of filmmakers who work in similar situations or with similar concerns comes from, but who do so from other traditions and other creative contexts."

For the young Cuban director, this commitment by the INSTAR Film Festival is important for "getting out of the endogamy that sometimes comes with belonging to a very specific national community, breaking those limits of being part of a guild, a generation and a country with "a very particular story, which sometimes becomes limiting." In this sense, he is convinced that "one of the damages that totalitarianism has done to us is breaking those bridges, both with other generations of Cuban filmmakers and with the rest of the world."

«I believe that placing the works of Cuban filmmakers, and the filmmakers themselves, in spaces of thought and debate with filmmakers from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, especially from regions of the so-called global south, will enrich our views, our aesthetic arsenal and our understanding of the world,” he says. «It will also gradually break that great myth instilled, largely also by totalitarianism, of the exceptional nature of Cuba, it will make us understand each other in a much more complex way within a global context. This exchange could allow us to find new productive and creative paths. There is learning, an exchange of experiences that we sometimes underestimate, and that is really where the solution is to make cinema, art and the life experience of Cubans increasingly richer.

According to the Cuban filmmaker Daniela Muñoz Barroso, who won the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award with her documentary Mafifa (2022) in the last edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, one of the main virtues of the contest is that it keeps Cuban filmmakers attentive to the films what their colleagues are doing, and at the same time gives visibility to independent Cuban cinema in different cities around the world, something extremely difficult for a community that does not exactly specialize in mainstream or commercial cinema.

"The fact that the Festival is becoming more and more international is very interesting because it puts our reality in dialogue with that of other countries in similar circumstances," he says. «It connects us all a little in these conflicts that we deal with every day. Mainly, migration. But I think there are other topics that the Festival is very interested in, such as freedom of expression.

Muñoz Barroso, who is also a producer, points out that the event also helps to disseminate films beyond their own margins, since both within the jury and among the spectators there are programmers and other people linked to the international distribution of cinema.

A wish of this Cuban filmmaker based in Madrid, who has seen the Festival grow during these six years, is that in the future the event will manage to bring together the community of Cuban filmmakers somewhere in the world. Muñoz Barroso does not harbor hopes that this can be done on the island – where INSTAR films are only available online – but believes that “yes, with all the diaspora there is, we could perfectly try to meet somewhere.”

Dean Luis Reyes, a Cuban critic specialized in independent cinema, asserts that "the INSTAR Film Festival is transcendental," since it was born "with the idea of ​​promoting a good part of the Cuban films that have not had access to movie theaters for a long time." a long time".

This is something, the researcher also highlights, that "has been happening practically since the emergence of Cuban independent cinema in the first decade of the 2000s and many of those films that did not find space; which became a perennial demand of young filmmakers.

In his opinion, after four editions of the Festival, we find ourselves in a context in which the event takes on another meaning. "Because since 2019, when the first exhibition was held in Havana, until now," he points out, "not only has INSTAR practically had to leave Havana, but also a good part of the contemporary Cuban filmmakers, especially the younger ones. , they have had to leave the country, and today we have a delocalized cinema, a post-national cinema, an increasingly transnational cinema - which already was, but now much more so. And it is also a cinema that has become fodder for censorship and that is not shown on the island for the simple fact that the filmmakers do not reside there.

Reyes emphasizes that, in Cuba, currently, there is "a situation of aggravation of censorship, of aggravation of the invisibility of independent cinema; which, associated with the entire humanitarian crisis that the country is experiencing and the exodus, makes the INSTAR Festival become an evidently much more necessary instance, because it becomes almost the repository of all those broken and fractured lines that have "to do with the exhibition, promotion and meeting of filmmakers."

Of course, the Cuban critic regrets, like Muñoz Barroso, the limitations of the Festival. "It is not exactly an event that occurs in a specific physical place where filmmakers meet, but rather it is a delocalized festival that occurs in several countries, in movie theaters, in cultural centers where it is exhibited," he comments. "And, furthermore, so that it can be seen in Cuba there is only the online option, which is the space we have left."

Despite the difficulties involved in making a festival with these characteristics, including the dispersion of the filmmakers and their audiences, Reyes considers that "the INSTAR Festival is probably the most important transnational film event in the history of Cuban cinema," and highlights the fundamental fact that it is "an exhibition that is produced beyond the cultural policies of the State, official censorship and the ways of understanding the island's cinema."

«This year there are 43 films, which makes it a much bigger event than it has ever been, from more than a dozen countries, and yet, when you watch the program, you realize that Cuban films they are dialoguing with a global situation; which has to do with the character of identity that it is acquiring, since it is above all a Festival that collects independent cinema, Cuban or non-Cuban, made in contexts in which there is a deficit of freedoms," Dean Luis Reyes finally reflects. «Many of these films speak from a transnational condition, from a global condition, and there you realize that they connect through their themes, their concerns, their way of approaching communities that are in the diaspora, that have connections with their countries of origin or not, but they are communities that suddenly have common themes and problems. You realize... when you see it and start connecting the threads between them. And that then becomes, to a large extent, one of the main identities that the Festival is acquiring, which from this fifth edition I see much more mature, much more concentrated in a kind of specific cultural policy, of character or of identity, as I call it, that would define what the INSTAR Festival is going to be from now on.

José Luis Aparicio, who at 30 years old is not only one of the most promising young Cuban filmmakers, but also one of the main researchers and archivists of independent Cuban cinema, says: «It is essential, in this kind of wasteland or desert in where we find ourselves, that there continue to be initiatives like this, spaces to meet, recognize and think about each other, so that our films are seen, shared, shown together, with each other, as part of that corpus that does exist, which is something "We are not inventing it, it is not an illusion or a mirage, but something verifiable."

"It is always very difficult, arduous, to do this Festival, but I believe that, if we do it every year, trying to grow and mutate, to find alternatives, it is because we believe it is necessary," continues the programmer of these events. «And we also [want] similar spaces to emerge, to break that monolithic unity so typical of the Cuban context of the last six decades. There needs to be more and more diversity, other voices, new events that find and define themselves, but not in opposition to others. I think the important thing is to give oxygen to the context, to make it less gray.

For now, when asked about the attitude and future objectives of the INSTAR team, Aparicio simply answers insistently: «Continue doing the Festival every year, continue growing and feeding on the experience, including more countries and visions. alternative cinematographic films. To be a space of cultural resistance against the attacks of totalitarianism and dictatorships, of violence, war, repression, and also, of course, of the market and capitalist logic, [bearers] of a hegemonic vision of cinema with which "We are not in tune either."