Jonathan Ali
By Jonathan Ali
In 2006 I became a programmer for the newly founded Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. It was exciting to be a part of this initiative in my native country. For far too long, cinema there had meant one thing—Hollywood—and here was an intervention seeking to rupture the status quo. In addition to bringing to audiences some of the best of contemporary world cinema, the festival also screened a new, emerging Caribbean cinema, and that included a new, independent Cuban cinema.
Over the next decade I was witness to a remarkable flowering of films from Cuba by a young and talented generation of filmmakers, some of whom we had the honour of welcoming at the festival. These filmmakers—many of them minted in EICTV, the Cuban independent film school, from which an increasing number of cinema practitioners from across the Caribbean are emerging—were heirs to the acclaimed cinema made under the revolution. And while they in no way sought to repudiate this tradition, the new wave was a breath of fresh air. Two fiction films from 2012 are emblematic. Carlos Lechuga’s Melaza, with its stringent political critique, pushed the idea of “Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing” to its limits. And in Carlos Quintela’s deceptively unassuming La Piscina, the child’s-eye view of the revolutionary society was no less probing.
The young cineastes knew that by making cinema outside the system that they would be critically viewed by many within it. But no doubt they also believed, perhaps naively in retrospect, that Cuban cinema could hold space for a diverse range of gazes and voices. We know what happened. By the time I left the festival in Trinidad and Tobago, and the country, in 2016, the signs that this new Cuban cinema and its makers would not be reconciled to power (or rather, vice versa) were becoming all too clear.
Since then, as part of the general exodus, there has been a steady stream of Cuban filmmakers from their native land. For them, and the filmmakers who remain in the island, these are, to say the least, challenging times. Those who find themselves separated from their country have a new appellation: diaspora filmmakers, with all that might entail.
The profound circumstantial changes that these filmmakers are experiencing will arguably be accompanied in their cinema by a recalibration of thematic concerns, as well as—and no less importantly—the strategies they employ in realising their films. Two recent works of creative documentary, the archival autofiction A Media Voz (Heidi Hassan and Patricia Pérez, 2019) and Llamadas desde Moscú (Luis Alejandro Yero, 2023), with its resourceful staging of refugee life, point to new formal possibilities, while implicitly foregrounding female and queer experiences, respectively.
Time can only tell what will come next. Yet with change and its concomitant challenges, however imposing, comes opportunities, however fraught, for a renewed sense of purpose, of new ways of doing and especially thinking. The light of the Cuban cinematic imagination will continue to shine, wherever it finds itself.
Jonathan Ali is a London-based film programmer, curator and writer.