Spotlight on Cuba: EICTV 2

Programme

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  Si no puedo bailar, esta no es mi revolución

  Lillah Halla asked five Cubans to dance in front of the camera to music that sums up their lives at that moment. The songs are inaudible to the viewer, but the rooms in which the people dance, the way they move and their facial expressions as they listen reveal their state of mind.
  
  The people dance in their own bedrooms, wearing earphones. The setting is intimate, but they gaze directly into the camera, as if looking into a mirror. A family dances together in a tiny room, an old man stands in a flooded house and a teenager jumps on a bed in front of a wall covered with posters. The portraits combine to produce an impression of the socioeconomic situation in Cuba.
  
  Halla graduated from the Cuban film academy EICTV in 2014. Her feature film debut Power Alley (2023) premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the FIPRESCI Award for Best Debut.

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  El árbol

  A tree is growing on the fifth floor of a dilapidated building in Cuba, its roots seeking the earth meters below.
  
  In filming the tree, Iranian filmmaker Roya Eshraghi reflects on questions about rootedness. The tree becomes a metaphor for a search: for the bond with her father, for a home, and for the meaning of the film itself. Because why does Eshraghi feel so connected to this tree?
  
  Blurred images of city dwellers punctuate shots of the filmmaker amid the rubble. Meanwhile, she calls her father, whose experiences show similarities with the fate of the tree.

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  Indicios, del inscrito

  This experimental short film Indicios, del inscrito, made as an assignment at the Cuban film academy EICTV, is based on the poem of the same name by José Kozer, a Cuban poet who is often categorized as belonging to the Latin American neo-baroque movement. This was a loosely associated group of poets who, from the 1970s onwards, preferred a hermetic and multidimensional approach to the conversational style that was common at the time.
  
  Kozer introduces the film himself with a stanza from his poem, which centers on his grandfather, an old rabbi reading his daily passage from the bible. As his fingers follow the sentences of the scripture, he dies.
  
  At this point, director Rafael Ramírez takes over with heavily edited images and intertitles, an associative whole that visually expresses Kozer’s parable. In this section, as in Kozer’s work, time and reality are subjective elements, and history merges seamlessly with the present.

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  Los niños lobo

  In an empty room, a boy tells his brother about the time he ate a snake in the forests of West Africa. Seamlessly, the brother adds details to the story.
  
  Yet it never actually happened. Together, the two brothers live in their own fantasy world. A little while later, they shoot Che Guevara’s traitor with play guns in a war game.
  
  The national history of Cuba and the experiences of their father, who fought in Angola and was wounded in the war, merge into a story of loyalty and betrayal. This sparsely composed short film creates a stark contrast between the poverty of the two brothers’ living conditions and the wealth of their inner world.

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  La despedida

  In his graduation documentary for the Cuban film school EICTV, Alejandro Alonso Estrella portrays an elderly former miner still living on the premises of the mine where he spent his entire working life.
  
  Images of great photographic quality contrast the lively household – he shares the modest home with his daughter and her young sons – with the waning energy of the old man. He spends his days smoking cigars, playing cards with his grandson, taking frequent naps and making occasional visits to the now closed and dilapidated mine. Aware of the fact that his time is almost up, he seeks to hold on to the past.
  
  After its premiere at IDFA in 2014, La despedida went on to win the Best Short Documentary Award at Gibara Film Festival (Cuba) and received awards at a number of student film festivals in Europe and Latin America, marking the beginning of a promising path for Alonso Estrella. His mid-length documentary Terranova (co-directed with Alejandro Perez) won a Tiger Short Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2021, and that same year his short documentary Abisal received a Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig.