In this article, I offer an analysis of the Cuban documentary Sueños al pairo (Dreams Adrift), which was scheduled to premiere in April 2020 at Havana’s young filmmakers’ annual showcase. While the documentary was immediately censored preventing its premiere, I examine how the filmmakers José Luis Aparicio Ferrera and Fernando Fraguela Fosado use multiple levels of hidden, and lost archival footage and memory to create a platform for the censored lyricist Mike Porcel to write him back into Cuban musical history in their documentary. Through the inclusion of the archived past, I consider how the documentary contests what Derrida refers to as archival house arrest by bringing the hidden images and stories back into the present. In doing so, I explore Arenillas and Furtado’s research on the relationship between documentary and the law, to consider how documenting the past in the public present creates a space for intervention. While state censorship of artists is not new in Cuban film, Sueños differs because it does not focus solely on the government’s responsibility; instead, it also studies the role of his artistic community in contributing directly to his silencing and does so from island-based filmmakers in dialogue with the diaspora. Despite a promising new legal framework for independent cinema, the censorship of Sueños’s premier appeared as a continuation of the same control Porcel had experienced years before. However, I show how the resounding artistic community response rejecting the film’s 2020 censorship and its refusal to premiere their own films, points to a rupture with Porcel’s censorship and Cuban film’s past, thus highlighting a space for artistic solidarity absent in Porcel’s time.
I offer a close look at the Cuban film El matadero, which premiered virtually in December 2021 from Havana via the 2nd annual streaming INSTAR Cuban Film Festival. In this documentary, independent Cuban director Fraguela Fosado combines a pastiche of digital modes to tell the personal story of two friends: one on the island - the filmmaker himself - and one off. I argue that the film’s uniqueness is in its use of digital and geographic spaces to capture Ana López’s concept of a “Greater Cuba.” I examine how the on-island filmmaker co-creates a platform with his off-island interlocutor enabling collaborative authorship through the use of the digital platform WhatsApp. In doing so, the film explores the friendship between the two young men through memory, archives, memes, and a particularly Cuban sense of humor. The result is a film that achieves a personal narrative of contemporary Cubanness across a digital diaspora both in the making of, the plot, and its subsequent distribution trajectory.
In this collection of testimonies Venezuelan community leaders share the history of popular movements in Venezuela that pre-date the Chavez administration. These testimonies also reveal the continuous compromises and challenges with the current administration defying the over-simplified representation of Venezuelan popular movements. The testimonies show a complicated Venezuelan reality that the mainstream media frequently overlooks with its exclusive focus on Chavez.
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