Discoveries from Cuba World Cinema

A humorous critique of public services from the perspective of both clients and workers, who receive bad treatment when they become clients.

Life and lives in New York City, sights and sounds of its streets and its people, at the time of man's first landing on the Moon.

short film about Lucía, a Cuban woman who had to emigrate

Two children set out to decipher the mystery of events the adults only talk about in secret: in the darkness of the moonless nights, cattle are disappearing along with the farmers who dare to confront the “monster” that is taking them.

Columbus discovered America and also tobacco. The Indian was exterminated but tobacco persisted.

Chinese emigration in Cuba and its presence as an integral element of national miscegenation.

An educational cartoon about what to do when mom is not at home and dad is in charge.

A Russian women moving through a Cuban landscape. She's disconnected, inflexible, passive. Communication with her surroundings does not seem possible. Wandering through places, places without connections.

A beautiful and attractive young girl initiates a game of seduction with her neighbor, a solitary painter who hides a secret.

A short film about Cuban women, post-revolution.

A young woman is robbed in the poor neighborhoods of Havana where she lives. Although she knows who the thief is, she remains silent.

Result of a collaborative process with women who suffered from baby blues.

Cuban filmmaker Enrique "Kiki" Álvarez's newest feature paints a slow-burning love story set in the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution in January of 1959. The Black Box is a secret diary written by Elsa and read by her granddaughter several decades later, a film about a young woman who finds and reads the experiential, emotional and political legacy that her grandmother has left hidden like a magical object. Featuring rare footage from the beginning of the Cuban Revolution.

Several pregnant women needing particular attention live in the Cuban Maternal Waiting Home 'La Casona' ('The Big House'). Yudi, a 15-years old girl tries, just as the others, to maintain a distant and dysfunctional relationship with the father of her future child.

As a result of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), many French settlers travelled to Eastern Cuba with African enslaved people to escape the revolt. The Tumba Francesa Societies, which were known as a brotherhood and a mutual aid network, emerged from these waves of slave migrations. Eventually, they became integral constituents of Cuban culture. La Tumba Mambi is a docu-fiction film based on the Tumba Francesa, La Caridad de Oriente, which is located in the city of Santiago de Cuba. Through the Society's youngest member, Flavio, who is collecting information about the Tumba Francesa for a school project, we meet his grand-mother Andrea and mother Queli, two charismatic knowledge keepers of their rich cultural traditions. The original film soundtrack composed and produced by Cuban based DJ Jigüe, in collaboration with Tumba Francesa members, is a rhythmic and striking reminder that the present is grounded in a history of struggles for freedom.

Ermitis Blanco is a prolific Cuban illustrator, cartoonist, and animator who has managed design concepts for many films and advertising from his Cuban house production Ñooo. Ermitis began his career as a magazine illustrator, then studied in the Animation Studies of ICAIC where he gained experience working for various prolific productions including Vampires in Havana II. The short film FLY was nominated for the Prix Jeunesse.

In the vast cosmos we are only insignificant particles. "Molecule" is a sensory journey, almost psychotropic of a universe full of anxiety. While everything outside looks beautiful, there are demons that haunt you inside.

Pepe, an old Spaniard, has improvised his own golf course on the outskirts of Madrid. Daniela, a young Cuban filmmaker, discovers his routine as she tries to portray him. Both have hearing disabilities.

On her 64th birthday, Zoe, a lonely, widowed Cuban exile, is about to become a grandmother. She is also about to receive an unexpected visit. After more than forty years without seeing each other, Helena, her childhood best friend, returns to catch up and explore their lives through songs, letters, and memories from their past. Without imagining that this reunion will change their lives forever, when a secret comes to light, they both have to reconsider their relationship.

A documentary from Stripe Press that follows the evolution of a rudimentary gaming network between friends in Cuba into a DIY internet that serviced most of the island.

Olga and Enrique live alone in the house they have shared since their wedding, 60 years ago. Faced with the uncertainty of the present, his life has been reduced to waiting and evoking the past.

Faría is an audacious prostitute whose life is in danger if she does not pay off a debt in less than 24 hours. Avelino is a fervent and honest communist who denounces the illegal business of his wife to the police. Miro is a young painter who fails to sell her paintings at the fair, but gets financial support from a foreigner in exchange for her company. These stories of difficult love and sexual corruption intersect when a mysterious painting enters the scene.

1:34, 2019, Cuba.

Striking images of the lives and deaths of captive animals loom in the background of everyday humanity.

Sayu, in her adolescence, struggles between divergent realities to shape her identity. On the one hand she is a Cuban who skates and loves to sing, but on the other hand she is a Japanese whose family wants to take her back to Japan to give her a better future.

Jose tries his best to adapt to his father's home, where he visits every other week.

Over the years Olga began to adopt abandoned street cats, but now she has more than she can handle.

On the outskirts of Havana, sandwiched between highways and public housing, a revolution is taking place. Here, in the district of Alamar, a 26-acre farming co-op provides employment for dozens of workers, while producing vegetables and medicinal plants for the local community and beyond. TIERRALISMO introduces us to everyone from agronomists and senior management to workers who plant, plow, and propagate. The film also covers non-farming aspects of the operation, such as human resources and accounting practices where transparency is paramount.

In 1961, the disappearance of ancestral medical practices was predicted as a consequence of the profound social and economic changes implemented by the recent Cuban Revolution. In 2021, the source of ancestral knowledge is kept alive through the universe of four characters and their relationship with nature.

Enrique Favez was a surgeon in Cuba from 1819 to 1823. He was the husband of Juana Favez. He was also a woman.

Through different experiences and memories from inhabitants of the Cuban city of Holguín, this is a documentary about how soccer works both as a means to enjoy the body and for the building of social bonds.

The film prendas — ngangas — enquisos — machines addresses the question of how we can reconnect the more-than-human with the historical, specifically the post colonial space, without deepening violations already inflicted on both humans and nonhumans?

Report on the Cuyaguateje River in the province of Pinar del Río. A journey along the western river, with a voice-over explaining the name of the tributary, the diversion of water to the lagoons, the sinkhole, and the life and work of the area's inhabitants.

A timeless look at art, love and beauty, The Oldies follows three elderly Cuban musicians as they relate their stories of struggle and reveal their undying passion for life.

In a small Cuban fishing village, Joel, the oldest brother in a traditional family, is heartbroken when his fiancée marries someone her family prefers. He moves to Havana, hoping to find a new life. Gorgeously photogenic, Havana and the Cuban countryside are exquisitely captured in director Kosyrev-Nesterov's elegiac feature debut.

A spatial poem, an experimental study in forms and moving structures, with light and color, that result in the ongoing creation of plastic images.

A promising young man from Matanzas decides to leave the field after an injustice against him, the death of his mother, and the depression of his father

A dreamlike oil-on-glass short where Juana Borrero, 19th-century Cuban painter-poet, wanders a tropical Eden guided by a Blue Rabbit and facing a wounded Velociraptor—an evocative meditation on memory, transformation, and the blurred lines between art and dream.

“Leonardo Padura, a miserable and moving story” is a biographical documentary about the Cuban writer and journalist Leonardo Padura Fuentes, winner of the Princesa de Asturias Prize for Literature and the National Prize for Literature of Cuba.

In 1987, a film school was founded next to a working-class town in western Cuba. For over three decades, hundreds of film students documented the lives of its people. Qué tiempos aquellos takes us to Pueblo Textil to explore what these memories mean today, what emotions they stir, and how they transform over time. A documentary about memory as both personal and collective experience.

Each year, nearly 450,000 Cubans leave their country. They cross the sea to escape a worn-out political regime, shortages, and hurricanes. In Havana, some mourn those who depart, while those who remain look for other ways to escape.

Evening falls and the children play in a town that seems suspended between the ruins of the past and an uncertain future.

As a massive hurricane bears down on Cuba, as society collapses around them, a cowboy and his mare mourn the loss of her stillborn foal. While the herd scatters into the wild brush and the sky darkens with fury, they hold on to a fragile rhythm of care and routine. In their sleep, storm and sorrow blur together, where the violence of nature reflects the crumbling of a world, pushing them toward an uncertain, fragmented tomorrow.

A squad of young Cuban armed forces recruits are tasked with defending a strategic key north of Cuba. The fraught relationships between the young soldiers and the sergeant who leads them transform as they discover his human qualities during training and learn discipline in the harsh conditions of their post.

Nadir, a man mired in depression and anxiety, finds a dangerous temptation in an old razor. In the midst of this emotional crisis, a childhood memory of his father teaching him how to shave makes him reconsider his motives for continuing. In a symbolic act of liberation, Nadir decides to shave, confronting his inner demons and taking control of his life. One final stroke of the razor, subtly guided by his father's hand, reveals that, although absent, he is still present.

A Cuban documentary about the Cuban baseball team INDUSTRIALES. The blues of the capital. The most followed and controversial team in the national pastime.

Based on a postcard from 1982 in which Cuban parents are explained how to put a gas mask on their children in the event of biological warfare against the United States, this piece explores and re-signifies the postcard itself and the state of fear and cultural/imperialist tension that caused it, specifically through cinematographic techniques such as montage and sound. Using fear as a lens through which to explore the experiences of the Cuban people in the not-so-distant past, it offers an evocative and affective look at some of the central tensions in Cuban history.

The filmmaker visits her dying father, a Cuban exile in Texas, for the last time. When she leaves, nothing remains: neither the father nor the country where she was born. A farewell letter to all that was lost and a welcome to the future.

‘According to the World Water Forum, between 80,000 and 100,000 people die every year in Latin America as a result of contaminated consumption of this liquid, which is essential for the survival of all forms of life. The problems persist... we waste time. What do we need to take care of our thirst? Raise consciousness!'

What awaits us when we cross a limbo? Who inhabits it? What memories do we encounter inside it?

Cuba's street numerology, gambling and symbols combine in an attempt to find meaning in everyday reality.

A group of sailors are carrying contraband. But inside the ship, a group is mutinying to take over the cargo.