Discoveries from Cuba World Cinema

A found fiction of the Cine Club Sigma

The story of Cuban revolutionary Ignacio Agramonte.

Every weekend at an illegal drag show in the suburbs of Havana, Sebastián, a 17-year-old Cuban teenager, transforms into 'Mila Caos', his empowered, flamboyant alter-ego. When he returns to his daytime self, Sebastián suffers from his mother's indifference, dreaming that one day she will see him on stage for who he truly is.

Tito is 23 years old with a mother who loves him and a car that allows him to earn an honest living. His neighbors see him as a formal and educated boy. Nobody knows that behind that façade hides someone with a nihilistic vision of life. And that involves committing terrible acts for which he may have to pay someday. But Tito does not care about the future. There is only the present.

About the election in assembly of the President of the Poder Popular (Popular Power)

Backstage musical: showbiz couple fusses and breaks up, then resolve their problems just before the end.

After committing an act of revenge, Katya experiences the first symptoms of her transformation.

In Cuba, artists have to be recognized by one of the state-sponsored art institutions that ensure their work complies with the state’s vision and policy. Existing as an independent artist means having no income and no rights, and being subjected to various forms of control and intimidation.

Based on the celebrated play by Abelardo Estorino

Javi shows up for the last time at a queer club where he works as a dancer, but he must deal with Castillo, a regular customer who resists the fact that he will never see him again.

Cuban peasants wield machetes in a violent uprising against Spanish authorities in the late 19th century.

Brother and sister Carlos and Gaby live live with their dysfunctional family where appearances are the most important thing. When Gaby leave for college overseas, Carlos' world falls apart.

In Old Havana, Cuba Street brings together the lives of four women who embody the resilience and fragility of an island in crisis. Anabel, a young actress, struggles between continuing her career in Cuba or emigrating to Europe to work as a cleaner. Dayana, 30, dreams of traveling to Russia and transforming herself physically to become the woman she has always felt she is. Mailén, a mother of 3, carries the scars of childhood and a relationship marked by violence, while fighting to support her family with optimism. Elvira, 74, survives scarcity while caring for her ill husband.

Havana, 1974. Almost every day, Ana puts a cuban flag on the balcony. The flag is faded and full of stains. Ana suggests to her husband Nicanor to get another one. From there the couple will be doomed to unexpected complications...

Filmmaker Daniela Muñoz Barroso has lost most of her hearing, and can barely hear high frequencies at all. She uses her eyes not only to see, but also to listen. And yet Barroso has developed a fascination for Gladys Esther Linares, aka Mafifa, a female musician who played the bell, a metal percussion instrument prominent in Cuban conga. Mafifa died 40 years ago, at a far-too-young age.

Juan is dead. Surprisingly, he is given an opportunity: to relive a moment of his past life, but it will not be an ordinary moment.

SIMPARELE is history interpreted through people's art. The film synthesizes the primary forms through which the Haitian people have expressed themselves in the centuries since the island's colonization by the French and the massive importation of African slaves to fuel its plantation economy. It is a composite of dance, theatrical tableaux, poetry, song, folk painting, legend and religious ritual. SIMPARELE acknowledges the powerful role which Afro-Haitian culture has played in these people's political struggle as both repository for people's history and the raw material from which that history can be reconstructed and transformed.

A Berlinale award nominated short documentary.

“The strange joy of living”, as the Italian poet Sandro Penna wrote, or how to make love until the end of our days. A middle-aged Cuban couple live in the countryside surrounded by animals. They do not own many belongings but they do have large doses of passion.

With a speech by Fidel Castro as the central theme, the effects of the terrorist attacks against the interests of the Cubana de Aviacion company are revealed, and Mozambique's independence is celebrated.

Short film from the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba (ISA/Instituto Superior de Arte).

Under the shadow of a regime frozen in time, two young Cubans find refuge in a lair of iron and gears. There, a strange rivalry emerges against an invisible presence that, in its silence, marks every aspect of their existence.

On 3rd May, in a country home in Santa Fé, a small town in the heart of Camajauní, Cuba, the Fusté family, descendents of Cimarron slaves, celebrates the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in a unique religious ritual combining Yoruba, Christian and spiritualist elements. The ritual exorcises the dead and invites them to possess the bodies of the living in order to invoke rain and harvests.

A documentary short film (as well as a social project) shot in Havana, which depicts today's Cuban skate scene through the eyes of a kid who feels nothing but love and joy for his activity.

Documentary about the history of the bateyes, informal settlements surrounding the mills to house workers. Throughout the film, Sara Gómez recovers the political and cultural relevance of black migrants.

The plot, set in Havana in the last period of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship, follows a young girl whose aspirations to obtain a scholarship in America, against the odds, are paralleled with her reading of Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea".

Fictional documentary in which researchers and ordinary citizens try to clarify the abrupt disappearance from the political scene of leaders once known as “trusted men,” and how they have been sighted in the most unlikely places. Finding these men and confronting them on camera is the goal of two investigators.

The multidisciplinary artist Glenda León transposes our seemingly ordinary reality into a site of poetic coincidences and imaginary and intimate moments. She owes her success to her discerning observation of the human condition. In Cada respire, the artist is stretched out on the grass by the seaside. As the camera gradually moves away from her, a flower detaches itself from the pattern of her dress and grows up to the rhythm of her breathing. Drawing inspiration from Flavio Garciandia’s masterpiece All You Need is Love (1975) – itself a reminder of Fidel Castro’s ban against playing Beatles’ music on the island – León pays tribute here to a generation of artists who had the courage to take action, but she empties this reference of its political content in order to praise its formal beauty; we all breathe the same air.

¡Yankis, Go Home!

Teresita's Dream follows the extraordinary story of Cuban scientist Teresita Rodríguez. When her mother is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, Teresita embarks on a deeply personal and politically complex journey to find a treatment – joined by a team of mostly women scientists. What begins as an effort to help her mother, leads to a discovery that could change how the world treats this devastating disease forever.

The origin of the chair. Its different styles and uses throughout the centuries, culminating in the most important chair in the world: the school desk.

A children’s short directed by one of the most well-known figures in Cuban animation.

A short film about the director’s relationship with sewing, a craft he knew from a very young age thanks to his seamstress mother.

"The Sierra can only be appreciated as a whole". Thus begins Heráclito criollo, a reflection on the ways of inhabiting what man understands as "the natural". He questions the imposition of human temporality on the different temporalities of animals and plants, questioning the existence of the forest as a whole. And how this imposition leads to human uprooting and animal exploitation.

The supposed discovery of the last reel of a long-lost film makes it possible to see this film... or chaos.

The memory of a friend who is no longer around torments Boloy’s thoughts. The key player on the Cuban volleyball team, Boloy tries to return to morning training despite the pain of the loss – because he knows that his life must go on.

Volcán captures a raised mound of earth set against a grassy riverbank. A white silhouette in the shape of a female body lies atop of the form. The same shot then cuts to a frame where the base of the white figure spontaneously starts smoking. It then quickly sets aflame. As it combusts, a deep cavity is revealed, even as it is cloaked in growing flames and smoke, evoking a volcanic eruption. Finally, the entire body is engulfed so that only ashes remain in the negative space, human remains. Mendieta short the work in 1975 at Old Man’s Creek in Sharon Center, Iowa, near where the artist was living at the time.

In his previous films, Hacerme feriante (2010) and Embodied Letters (2015), Julián D’Angiolillo managed to go deep inside two universes that, even though they take place in front of everyone, remained invisible and inscrutable, as though they were subterranean—that of La Salada fair and of the authors of political graffiti in walls. For Ongoing Cave, his third work, the director goes back underground, this time in a literal manner, in order to reveal the mysteries of speleology, the science that studies caves and caverns. Italy, Slovenia, Cuba; antiwar bunkers; an exploring, revolutionary ballerina; an electronic party in which the stalactites and stalagmites dance under the flashlights. Everything is part of the ecosystem of tunnels and people that D’Angiolillo connects on screen, through images in which what lies still comes to life.

Cuba, 1961. A young teacher arrives with the intention of teaching a peasant family to read and write…

An episodic film featuring the musical, choreographic and comedic skills of a variety of actors and actresses.

A short poetic evocation by Sara Gómez of Isla de Pinos, the island where Fidel Castro was imprisoned by Batista, where the revolution builds a new society. A juxtaposition of the Presidio Modelo prison with citrus production.

Vicenta Bravo is a woman with a special gift for reading cards and fortelling people's future. Every day folk flock to her home looking for solutions to their problems. Vicenta lives happily with her son, until he decides to leave Cuba and everything starts to fall apart. Thrown into a crisis that prevents her from seeing what's happening around her, Vicenta will embark on a journey taking her inland to a country where everyone seems to have lost their faith.

Documentary addressing the difficulties that arose in the city of Nuevitas (Camagüey) between 1964 and 1967, due to the industrial development promoted in the territory, which led to an unexpected population growth in just a few months.

At the elementary school where Evita, Nicanor’s daughter, studies, the parents are instructed that the children must bring photos of various independence heroes for an important activity the next day. That night, when he discovers that they do not have any photos of heroes at home, Nicanor will have to go out and look for them, no matter what it takes.

In the future, a traveling android arrives in a deserted Havana in search of Las Vegas, a mythical cabaret founded by a guerrilla fighter.

Analysis of events in Congo from independence to the death of Patrice Lumumba.

A young philology student interviews José Lezama Lima for his thesis. In his confrontation with the writer, he changes his point of view until he becomes a creator and continuator of Lezam's work, driven by the characters and the action of Paradiso, the central work of his research. Friends and researchers go to the poet's house and to the dinner organized by Doña Augusta Olaya, during which they offer their points of view about Lezama Lima and his work.

Five young Cubans, ex-revolutionaries, meet after years in Havana during a dancing carnival night.

Animated short film from Elpidio Valdés' series. Coronel Elpidio Valdés is in New York to get help from cuban inmigrants for the war. But Coronel Andaluz is spying him and tells NY police about his presence. Then, the police will try to catch Elpidio Valdés and the cuban ship in the docks.

Controversial cinéma vérité analysis of Havana’s lumpenproletariat in waterfront bars and cafés shortly after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.

Story about family disintegration and the trauma caused by Lucy, having an occasional "affair" with a young man whom the family has used as a companion for their son. Infidelity and betrayal result in unhappiness for the Crowns throughout their lives.

Gregorio, Dolores and Zoila are three elders excited about the arrival of a new member to the family; Esteban, their great-grandson. Through the memories of their ancestors, they narrate themes of loneliness, love, union, loss, and hope. They search through their belongings for a special gift to leave to a future Esteban, who may never know them as an adult. The short film itself is a gift that will make them endure in their family history.

Analysis of the educational revolution in Cuba.

In Santiago de Cuba, rival conga bands scour the sparse marketplace for materials to create show-stopping numbers for the annual Carnival competition. O’Reilly’s film follows young, innovative Lázaro, who is determined to beat “the Shark,” his older and more establishment-favored competitor. Tensions build and tempers flare as the government restrictions and scarcity of present-day Cuba come to bear on one of the world’s poorest Carnivals.