The short Norheimsundof the director Ana Alpizar, has raised at the Venice Festival the distance relations that many young people from Cuba maintain with foreign adults yearning for a “better life.”
The tape is one of the fourteen short films that compete in the Horizons section of the prestigious Venetian Mostra, dedicated to the new avant -garde and cinematographic aesthetic.
Norheimsund It is the name of a Norwegian people very present in the day -to -day life of a mother and a daughter in Havana, since from there, on the other side of the world, the girl is courted by phone by an older man who promises a better future by her side in Europe.
The girl, instigated by her own mother, tries to keep the romance alive, posing in photos and getting pretty because receiving a message implies keeping open a way out of the island.
However, those dreams twist when, by chance, this “Cinderella” finds out that man is not how he imagined.
“My source of inspiration was the reality in Cuba. Many friends I had in my adolescence passed similar stages. It is not something strange right now, sex tourism and the case of girls who marry Europeans is constant,” he says EFE Alpizar by phone.
The filmmaker, who resides in the United States and studies film direction at the University of New York, says that this phenomenon “has become normal and socially accepted.”
“Cuba is a very hermetic country. The situation is so hard … Young people have lost, or almost, the hope of having progress within the country,” he laments.
The short film arose as a project that the director had to do for the second year of her New York studies and, thus, took her camera and returned to Havana, where she obtained permission to shoot “without any problem,” he acknowledges.
Now the story has reached one of the most important film competitions in the world, the Venice Festival, and could be announced winner on the night of September 6, when the Golden Lion and the rest of the palmarés of this 82 edition are known.
Alpizar considers that the presence of this little story, of Norheimsundin the Mostra it has been “very exciting”, although when she received the confirmation that she had been selected came to think at first that it was a joke.
