Lights on Cuba at the Miami Film Festival

MIAMI, United States. – The Miami Film Festival, at Miami Dade College, announced its programming for its 41st edition, which will be held from April 5 to 14, 2024. More than 180 films, of all genres and from more than 30 countries guarantee the importance of the event in the panorama of international festivals.

This year the section dedicated to the Cuban theme, which was under my curatorship for the second consecutive time, is distinguished with the name “Spotlight on Cuba.” It contains nine functions that immerse us in the vicissitudes of the Island and exile from aesthetic virtues and conceptual depth.

Without a doubt, the political backroom is inevitable in such memorable and plausible arguments, but it fails to break their humanist and enduring significance.

It is worth knowing, as director Ernesto Daranas has stressed, that his countryman, the most luminous documentary filmmaker born on the Island, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, returns to Miami – where he died in 2003 -, through the front door, venerated with frankly historical projections .

This will happen thanks to the documentary Landrian directed by Daranas, considered an early classic, since it was presented as such at the Venice Film Festival. The audiovisual includes five of Landrián’s works recovered by Daranas himself from the only 35 mm copies that exist in the battered vaults of the ICAIC.

The Miami Film Festival will also serve as a platform for the re-release of Inside Downtown (2001), also in complete and remastered version, thanks to academic Jessica Gordon-Burroughs. It is the last documentary made by the legendary director together with Jorge Egusquiza in the city of Miami.

To these exclusive presentations in the United States is added The wild woman, by Alan González, an incursion into the social void of the Island alongside the great actress Lola Amores, who plays a beaten but invincible woman in an energetic quest to assert herself as a mother, in the most difficult circumstances. The screening is preceded by the short Blue Pandora, from the same director.

Another feature film present at the Festival – unforgettable, with poetic verve in the midst of the Cuban morass – will be Oceans are the Real Continents, which belongs to the Italian Tommaso Santambrogio. In San Antonio de los Baños, a passionate couple of young lovers sees their relationship disturbed by imponderables of the battered reality that they cannot overcome.

For its part, The Geeks uses the sinister true story of young rockers and rebels who injected themselves with HIV to improve their miserable lives in a sanatorium, from which few emerge unscathed. Once again Héctor Medina bursts in with an anthological character due to his strength and desperation. Renowned American directors take care of the fascinating story: Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz.

Alejandro Rentería, for his part, tells another side of the coin in his short Objects of desireimmersion in the turbidity of Miami, where a vengeful man wants to settle his divorce by exploring some possibility of irremediable separation with the help of an unscrupulous young Cuban who has recently arrived in the city.

Other documentaries complete the diverse and revealing vision of the Cuban circumstance. In the hot one. Tales of a Reggaeton Warriordirected by Fabien Pisani, tells the story of Candyman, a controversial performer and composer of the urban genre in Cuba in the 90s, obliterated by official channels and erased from national culture, but of unusual popularity.

Antihero, by director Patricia Juárez, is the story of a Cuban artist, José Manuel Domínguez, dedicated to theater, with works of unexpected acuity and depth based on what could be a limitation, his lack of vision. Domínguez directs the Antiheroes Project, where he has shown that art is a true balm to overcome obstacles that seem insurmountable in life.

Also as part of the “Spotlight on Cuba” program, the documentary Securityby Cuban director Tamara Segura, who lives in Canada, addresses her return to the island after four years of absence, and the attempt to reconcile with her father, a Castro militant, who suffered the attacks of the regime he served and, in For good measure, he tormented the fate of his family.

Program and tickets for the event at: miamifilmfestival.com

OPINION ARTICLE
The opinions expressed in this article are the exclusive responsibility of the person issuing them and do not necessarily represent the opinion of CubaNet.

Follow our channel WhatsApp. Receive information from CubaNet on your cell phone through Telegram.