Classics of Cuban exile cinema such as Improper conduct (1983), The lost City (2005) or planted (2021) will be collected from this October 20 in the Archive of the Cuban Cinema of the Diasporaa project co-directed by academic Santiago Juan-Navarro and filmmaker Eliécer Jiménez-Almeida.
This initiative seeks to organize in a single public repository the formidable creative heritage of the filmmakers who left the Island in recent decades, and whose work addresses the issues of uprooting, politics, resistance and Cuban history since 1959.
A press release from the organizers announces the launch of the platform at the American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora, in Miami, on October 20, the day on which Cuban culture is celebrated, at 7:00 p.m.
During the ceremony, the Cuban Diaspora Film Archive award will be given to the filmmaker Orlando Jiménez Leal, known, among other films, for having filmed the short documentary with Sabá Cabrera P.M, whose censorship initiated the controversial cultural policies of the Revolution. The film will also be screened that night. Improper conduct, of the director himself.
“Through the compilation and archiving of materials related to these filmmakers, the portal seeks to lay the foundations for a new history of Cuban cinema that accounts for the extensive audiovisual production made outside of Cuba,” declares the statement, which presents the character of the Archive as a “research project”.
The Archive will integrate five projects. The first, Filmmaker, brings together data on Cuban filmmakers in exile and, at the moment, has names such as Néstor Almendros, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Gustavo Pérez and Lilo Vilaplana.
The Archive of Cuban Cinema of the Diaspora becomes the only academic initiative, inside and outside the Island, that challenges the unilateral discourse of Icaic
With Forum, a biennial symposium, and FESTin, a traveling exhibition, the Archive will enrich its film collection. The cinema that is made on the Island will be dealt with by Cubafile, and the total progress of the initiative will be recorded CDfAReview, a magazine specialized in Cuban cinema.
In addition, prizes and diplomas will be awarded on an annual basis, which motivate new creation and consecrate the trajectory of notable filmmakers.
The Archive is supported by Florida International University (FIU), the Office of the Provost and the Wolfsonian Laboratory for Public Humanities, in addition to the FIU Department of Modern Languages, the Cuban Research Institute (CRI), the Kimberly Green Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACC) and the CasaCuba cultural space.
“For years there has been a complaint that the universities do not do enough to make the Cuban reality known,” complain Juan-Navarro and Jiménez-Almeida. “The Cuban Diaspora Film Archive is committed to changing that situation.”
In addition to an extraordinary conservation project, the Archive of Cuban Cinema of the Diaspora becomes the only academic initiative, inside and outside the Island, that challenges the unilateral discourse of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC).
This organization systematically censored and canceled several of the filmmakers who today make up the Archive’s staff, and from its origin it was one of the most severe ideological bastions of the Revolution, under the command of its president, Alfredo Guevara.
Juan-Navarro and Jiménez-Almeida react against this ideological and archival monopoly, focused on their project to rescue and systematize the Cuban visual legacy in exile.
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