Filmmaker Alejandro Alonso qualifies to aspire to an Oscar

SAN LUIS POTOSÍ, Mexico.- Cuban filmmaker Alejandro Alonso has qualified to aspire to an Oscar award, after winning the recently concluded international short film festival Vienna Shortsheld in the Austrian city.

According to the EFE agency, the short film History is written at night by Cuban filmmaker Alejandro Alonso Estrella won the main prize.

His film was chosen from a total of 306 films from 67 countries that were screened during the week in various cinemas in Vienna, within the framework of the 21st edition of the contest that concluded this Sunday.

Vienna Shorts It is a qualification festival for the Academy Awards (Oscar), the European Film Awards (EFA), the British BAFTA Awards, as well as the Austrian Film Award. The Viennese festival is also endowed with 5,000 euros.

Alonso Estrella’s short film is a Cuban-French production and competed in the Fiction and Documentary category.

The synopsis of the film invokes a very Cuban reality: “A great blackout has plunged Cuba into darkness. In the streets, the inhabitants try to escape the gloom while the fire of the bonfires seems to announce the end of an era. Taking refuge inside our house, my mother tells me a vision that has been tormenting her for years.”

History is written at night It premiered at the beginning of 2024 at the prestigious Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands. It is a film that he asks to see in the dark, as if immersed in the darkness of a world “about to disappear.”

“The premise was to film a blackout in its most ‘pure’ state, without artificial lights, only using the lighting of the environment. The biggest challenge was the low sensitivity that the cameras had for filming in the dark. The solution came with my first Sony Alfa, a very versatile and bright camera, with an extremely high ISO. “Its sensor sees more than the human eye,” he told CubaNet in an interview.

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“This short is made from the accumulation of images that I have been archiving for almost five years. Many of them are even research material for other projects. The territory that we see in the film is a Frankenstein of spaces, built with remnants of Pinar del Río, Havana, Bahía Honda and the Zapata Swamp. Fragments of encounters with people, spaces and situations that revolve around a very basic situation: the search for a source of light in the midst of darkness. This process was extended until mid-2023. We did the last stretch of filming with the support of Lázaro Lemus, who managed to film the wave of blackouts that hit Pinar del Río last year.”