Festival de cine INSTAR

Press

2023

December 15, 2023

Three women who dream and make a country. A conversation with the film director…

Fernando Fraguela makes one thing clear: Women Who Dream of a Country (2022) is a film that is made for the present, yes, but above all for the future. Women Who Dream of a Country, with testimonies from activist Daniela Rojo, poet Katherine Bisquet, and professor and art historian Anamely Ramos, is an attempt…

December 12, 2023

IV INSTAR Film Festival awards the documentaries “Mafifa” and “The Zero Option”

The independent documentary Mafifa (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso, was awarded along with La opción cero (2020), by Marcel Beltrán, at the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival that took place last week in seven cities on two continents, and in Cuba virtually. Mafifa, which makes a surprising…

December 12, 2023

Mafifa                                                                                                                                                            

The INSTAR Festival-winning film Mafifa premiered at IDFA in Amsterdam in 2021, was screened at the Havana Film Festival in 2022, and won the Best Documentary Feature Award at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. In it, Daniela Muñoz Barroso attempts to construct a portrait of the title character, a woman of a more...

December 12, 2023

‘Mafifa’ and ‘The Zero Option’, awarded at the IV INSTAR Film Festival (2023)

The Cuban independent film Mafifa (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso, received the Nicolás Guillén Landrián award given by the jury of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, while La opción cero (2020), by Marcel Beltrán, deserved a special mention. Both feature films were recognized for reflecting a…

December 11, 2023

‘Leaves of K’, an urgent film. Interview with filmmaker Gloria Carrión

The Cuban independent film Mafifa (2021), by Daniela Muñoz Barroso, received the Nicolás Guillén Landrián award given by the jury of the IV INSTAR Film Festival, while La option cero (2020), by Marcel Beltrán, deserved a special mention. Both feature films were recognized for reflecting a…

December 10, 2023

‘Mafifa’, by director Daniela Muñoz Barroso, receives the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award

As defined in the award decision, Mafifa – which premiered at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) – would then be the work that best reflects and explores, among the 15 contestants, “a taboo subject in its corresponding society.” The decision took into account, above all…

December 10, 2023

Experimental shorts by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde                                  

The Villaverdes were part of the ICAIC and supporters of the Cuban Revolution until 1965. That year, the tensions between filmmakers and the powers that be that run through the history of the Cuban film institute led them to make the decision to leave the country, convinced that their place could not be in the socialist...

December 10, 2023

Four directors talk about the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival  

The IV INSTAR Film Festival has been taking place these days with a very notable transnational perspective this 2023. Its organizers insist on committing themselves to those filmakers and the “risky” films that “explore the limits of the unusual, the experimental: the limits of creation.”

December 09, 2023

Miguel Coyula and Rafael Ramírez: the multiverses of two Cuban auteurs

At the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, the directors were included in the special presentations with the feature films Corazón azul (Miguel Coyula; 2021) and Las campañas de invierno (Rafael Ramírez; 2019). Coyula’s film was screened this Friday, December 8 at the Maison de l’Amérique…

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