Iconoclastic Young Filmmakers Look at Real Issues in Cuba

Lighting up dark areas of Cuban society with youthful vigour, Muestra Joven (the Young Cinema Exhibition), a local independent film event, reached its 10th anniversary characterised by experimentation and subjects that are both complex and invisible in the national media.

"The exhibition has earned a place for itself, against all the odds," Danae Diéguez, a member of the organising committee since 2006, told IPS about the festival that took place Feb. 22-27.

The sharp criticism expressed in the films has clashed more than once with the authorities, as seen for instance in the attempt to censor the documentary "Revolution", by Mayckell Pedrero, about the underground Cuban hip hop duo Los Aldeanos. The film was awarded several prizes in 2010.

Filmmaker Carlos Y. Rodríguez said one of the virtues of the festival is that it creates "a space for works that deal with controversial real-life problems."

Rodríguez, who is from Santiago de Cuba, 861 kilometres east of Havana, told IPS that this goal has been achieved "prudently, by educating filmmakers and also, to a lesser extent, society."

The festival, launched in 2000, was called the New Directors' Exhibition until this year, when it was renamed Muestra Joven (Young Cinema Exhibition).

Cuba's film institute, ICAIC, coordinates the event, but according to Diéguez it upholds the "open mentality" that is a hallmark of the new generation of Cuban filmmakers.

Thanks to the growing availability of video cameras, democratisation of technology in the country had already progressed by the start of the new century.

Works by those who picked up a camera and recorded films purely for pleasure were collected in the late 1980s and early 1990s and exhibited by the Asociación Hermanos Saíz, a non-governmental cultural organisation for young artists, paving the way for ICAIC's initiative.

The aim of the ICAIC exhibitions was to "bring together, attract and identify the group of people who make alternative movies, outside the bounds of the film industry, with different approaches to production, media, and to some extent style," Diéguez said.

Films presented at the festival attained new qualitative heights with the advent of digital technology, which expanded the potential for filming and editing. The costs of a production of this type are paid by the filmmakers and any personal supporters they may have who can contribute funding.

"Independence is both material and mental," said Diéguez.

Prostitution, violence against women, drug addiction, small farmers forced to abandon their land because of lack of resources, shortcomings in the public education system, the superficiality of Cuban institutions, and poverty are some of the topics addressed by the films each year.

Film expert Enrique Colina says the young people who gather at the exhibition have a passion for the burning issues of Cuba's day-to-day reality, which arises from the absence of critical and social journalism in this Caribbean island nation where the mass media have been in state hands since the mid-1960s.

Social criticism plays a leading role in the festival films. "It has allowed people to express all those things that have damaged them deep down, including intense and hard-hitting social issues," Ariagna Fajardo, who works for Televisión Serrana, a community video and TV project in the east of the country, told IPS.

This 27-year-old creative artist has been singled out for distinctions at the festival, in 2010 for "¿A dónde vamos?" (Where Are We Going?) about rural migration, and this year for "Papalotes" (Kites), which deals with the inertia that has overtaken people in Cuba.

This year there were 69 competition entries, and the main categories were fiction, documentary, animation and original score.

"Memorias del desarrollo" (Memories of Development) by Miguel Coyula won the fiction and original score prizes. It is the first movie to be filmed and exhibited in both the United States and Cuba since the U.S. embargo was imposed in 1962. The film was made possible by its independent, not-for-profit status.

The film takes up the story of Sergio, the leading character in "Memorias del subdesarrollo" (Memories of Underdevelopment), an iconic film by the late Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

Fajardo said the exhibition helps get local stories onto the screens in cinemas in the capital, some of which later resonate with audiences in other countries. But in spite of the attractiveness, strength and topicality of many films, "perhaps they will not generate dialogue beyond Havana's movie houses," she lamented.

However, experts say the main distribution circuit for these films is as alternative as the exhibition itself.

USB flash drives that plug into computers are used for person-to-person circulation, often on the black market, of films like "De leones, buzos y tanqueros" (2008), about people who scavenge recyclable materials on the streets and in garbage dumps, to survive.

On the so-called "USB market", pirated local or international films, television serials or shows recorded on compact disks, DVDs or external storage devices are informally rented or sold.

It is also a Cuban custom to swap or give away all kinds of digital-format audiovisual products, for entertainment or information purposes.

Amateur films compete on equal terms with those by professional directors at the exhibition, which in its first 10 years has launched now-recognised filmmakers like Lester Hamlet and Pavel Giroud, and has helped drive the current boom in independent films in Cuba.

Since 2009, a selection of the films presented at the Havana exhibition has subsequently toured all the country's provinces. "But they cannot get to regions that are remote from the provincial capitals. That population is left out, and does not find out what's going on," Fajardo stressed.

On several occasions, Magali Cavus, a researcher at the University of Lyon in France, has taken Cuban Young Cinema works and alternative films to France. "The films help people to see Cuba not just in black-and-white, but in many more shades," she told IPS.

By Ivet González

From: IPS

Trailer for the documentary "Revolution", screened in 2010 at Muestra Joven

Revolution
Mayckell Pedrero Mariol / Norway / 2010 / 50 min.
This film, by Cuban director Mayckell Pedrero Mariol, is currently one of the most controversial works on the "island of freedom". It had only one public screening in Havana. Just to be on the safe side, journalists and bloggers were not allowed to attend. The protagonists of this documentary are members of the hip-hop group Los Aldeanos, whose lyrics faithfully describe the true reality of Cuban life. For Aldo and El B rap is a war, the Cuban leader is Pinocchio, and free speech is one of the most basic human rights. With their incisive and politically incorrect hip-hop, they have gained considerable popularity among young Cubans. Even though their records are self-released, they are constantly winning music awards. Besides interviews with the group's members and footage of their concerts, this formally inventive film - riotously edited in the style of a music video with a large dose of hip-hop - also presents black-and-white glimpses of everyday life on the streets of Havana, where Los Aldeanos are trying to light the way towards better times.

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Cuban artists expose revival of racism on the island

The Raft (2010), ARMANDO MARIÑO.

Rebellion is in the air. Whether in the cities of Africa and the Middle East, or within disparate communities of artists, people are examining the current status of human rights and finding it lacking.

While street crowds are forcing political change, the liter­ati are prodding more benign conversation about perceived inequities.

A case in point is the taboo-bashing exhibition "Queloides: Race & Racism in Cuban Contemporary Art" at the Mattress Factory. "Queloides" translates as "keloids," protruding scars caused by trauma, which exhibition curators apply to the wounds racism has inflicted upon the body politic.

This show, which opened last year at the prestigious Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo Lam in Havana, hit a nerve within the island's bureaucracy, which projects an image of social harmony. When Pittsburgh-based co-curator Alejandro de la Fuente tried to visit family in June, he, his wife and child were turned back at the airport by Cuban authorities.

The exhibition can be seen on multiple levels dependent upon one's familiarity with Cuban culture, history and contemporary politics. But none of that is necessary to be seduced by the effervescent artworks that herald it. In the museum parking lot is Armando Marino's classic 1950s Plymouth, its chassis replaced by multiple pairs of bare-footed, dark-skinned legs. Elio Rodriguez's inflated black protuberances -- a cross between alien invasion and suggestive body parts -- wind across the roof and upper story of the satellite gallery at 1414 Monterey. Both are startling, a bit surreal, and certain to stimulate the imagination -- vintage Mattress Factory.

The socialist state declared an end to racism as a part of the reforms instituted during the 1960s revolution. But whatever progress had been made disappeared in the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, reducing funding to Cuba and resulting in the economic crisis of "The Special Period." As opportunities dried up, the already disadvantaged tended to suffer the most, an observation that makes the exhibition broadly applicable as economies shrink globally.

Artists who were educated in the egalitarian era before the turmoil began to reflect the issue of racism in their work. The first two "Queloides" exhibitions were held in Havana in 1997 and 1999. The time felt right for a third edition to Dr. de la Fuente, an authority on race in Cuba and a University Center for International Studies professor of history and Latin American studies at the University of Pittsburgh. A 2007 conversation with co-curator Elio Rodriguez sparked the process.

Enter the Mattress Factory, which has a history of giving voice to artists who would otherwise be unheard, from Eastern Europe to East Asia. In 2004-05, the museum presented "New Installations, Artists in Residence: Cuba," which included work by two artists in the current show, Meira Marrero and Jose Toirac, who collaborated with Loring McAlpin.

"In every country, artists are addressing issues of fairness and social justice ... . They give a visibility to hidden problems in a way that affects one on a visceral level," write museum co-directors Barbara Luderowski and Michael Olijnyk in the exhibition catalog.

Ironically, the Bush administration denied visas to the artists of the 2004 show, so their "residency" was virtual and physical works were completed per instruction by Mattress Factory staff. The 2010 artists were permitted to travel to Pittsburgh to create additional works for this venue.

The 2010-11 "Queloides" comprises video, installation, painting, photography and works on paper by 13 artists, five of whom have been represented in all three shows. All were Cuban-born, but several now live and/or work outside Cuba. Two are deceased, Pedro Alvarez and Belkis Ayon.

The Cuban cultural authorities at first approved the Havana show, but later tried to rescind their decision. To save it, Dr. de la Fuente agreed not to attend the exhibition even as he encouraged the artists to carry on. It was the month after the show closed that he tried to re-enter Cuba.

There were three guidelines thought important for the current show: That it open in Cuba, that it travel outside the country, and that it be accompanied by a catalog. The latter has significance in that it documents all of the "Queloides." The previous shows had been ignored by the Cuban art world and press and thus lost to memory.

As fascinating as is the context, the work carries the exhibition, suspending the viewer between visual language that is familiarly contemporary and more exotic references.

Mr. Marino's "The Raft" gains dimensionality if read as commentary on, perhaps, the exploitation of blacks in the Cuban labor market, Cuba's economic plight which keeps consumer goods out of the reach of many, or the various means islanders have employed in often failed attempts to reach the U.S. mainland (www.floatingcubans.com).

Mr. Rodriguez's "Black Ceiba" conflates the Ceiba tree -- sacred to religious practices of indigenous peoples and Afro-Cuban syncretic cults -- with stereotypes of black sexuality and violent behavior.

Other senses come into play via the acrid smell of charred wood in Roberto Diago's solemn "Ascending City," and the kitchen sweetness of the walls of brown sugar bricks in Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons' transporting "Guardarraya." In this multimedia piece, viewers are guided to a projection that distorts like fun-house mirror reflections over a rectangle of refined white sugar on the floor. The video, and one on the wall, shows images of two women, one black and one white, embracing and exchanging a bouquet of flowers. Its sensuality is heightened by images of fruits, including several split pomegranates, a traditional symbol of feminine fertility in Western art.

As "Guardarraya" obliquely references the grassy passageways between thickly planted fields of sugar cane, Douglas Perez's imposing five-panel "Ecosystem" takes form from the large centipedes that populate those fields. But a closer look reveals rows of brown figures, some sporting clothing with brand logos, that morph into sickly and then skeletal shapes.

Fruit is one of the subjects that appears throughout the exhibition -- symbolic of Cuba's tropic lushness, of Latin stereotypes, of the offerings made by followers of Afro-Cuban religions. Alexis Esquivel designed tongue-in-cheek "Urban Sarayeye VAPROR -- 2059, Automatic Vehicle to Collect Religious Offerings," a robot to whisk away spoiling fruit left by devotees in public places more clinically than sanitation personnel who risk being accused of religious bias.

Religion is another thread that manifests through the exhibition. Marta Maria Perez Bravo uses her body as prop for powerful photographs that channel the mystical aura of Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion that combines Yoruba, Roman Catholic and Native Indian traditions.

In the stone-lined lower gallery is Mr. Toirac and Ms. Marrero's "Ave Maria," a table holding several versions of Cuba's patron Virgin of Charity of El Cobre, seemingly afloat on a blue sea of carpet. The statues, which range from kitsch to antique, each depict the Virgin Mary and the three Juans -- a Creole, an Indian and a slave -- that she saved during a storm, a display of folk belief that doubles as a plea for unity.

Manuel Arenas and Rene Pena more pointedly address race and the outsider status of the black male. On the far wall of Mr. Arenas' minimalist white cubical space are the words "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?," a phrase employed by the American abolitionist movement. Mr. Pena's photograph "Samurai" graces the catalog cover. The artist, nude save for a hat, holding a sword, and in a pose that references Donatello's "David," plays between Renaissance ideals of self-awareness and beauty, and cultural notions of blacks as threatening and unattractive.

There is more to explore, not the least being the many references to U.S. politics and culture that suggest Cubans are a lot more cognizant of what's happening here than we are of a country so near.

This "Queloides" continues a pluralistic and inclusive conversation on "racism, nation, history, and Cubanness" that began a dozen years ago, Dr. de la Fuente writes in the catalog. "From the island, some intellectuals cum bureaucrats are now trying to monopolize this conversation, to encapsulate it in sterile official commissions, and to hide it behind the mediocrity of patriotism and insularity. They are wasting their time.

" 'Queloides' proves it."

By Mary Thomas

From: Post-Gazette

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